Historically Black colleges, once the prime source for a generation of the nation’s top professional football players, are set to be back in the national spotlight this weekend when the ABC Television Network puts two HBCUs center-stage in this season’s first college football bowl game.
North Carolina A&T University, the champion of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC), and Alcorn State University, the winner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), are set for Saturday’s Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl to be played in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome and telecast nationwide on ABC as it kicks off the bowl season.
It’s the first time in college football history for such a bowl pitting the two HBCU conference champions on a free television nationwide network broadcast. It reflects a rare opportunity for HBCUs to be recognized nationwide with paying the millions an institution might otherwise have to pay for such high-level brand name advertising.
The first-of-its-kind bowl game also represents a major risk for ABC and ESPN, the network’s subsidiary that owns the Celebration Bowl and has put millions of dollars into it, including $1 million for each college conference.
“There’s a generation of people, like an underserved market, who know little or nothing about HBCUs,” says John Grant, ESPN’s executive director of the Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl. “To have your sporting event on a major network is really about recruiting students, not just student athletes,” says Grant, stressing the potential widespread impact a bowl appearance could have on an institution’s future.
Grant, a former veteran executive of 100 Black Men of Atlanta, is not a newcomer to promoting college football events. He helped run the Atlanta Football Classic for many years, he says, and recalls the history of others. They are no easy task to pull together, stage and execute but worth the challenge, he adds.
As for this bowl game, Grant says ESPN has signed a six-year contract with the two major HBCU athletic conferences to stage the Celebration Bowl and he sees it as a long-term investment and payout for the network and participating institutions. Each conference shares its $1 million bowl guarantee among member institutions based on a predetermined formula.
