Most bowl games are exhibitions with a trophy attached. Nobody’s season is defined by them. The two teams that walk into Mercedes-Benz Stadium on the second Saturday of December are playing for a national championship, and both of them gave up a shot at the FCS playoffs to get there.
That is the Celebration Bowl. It is the only active bowl game featuring FCS teams, it is the de facto national championship of Black college football, and the price of admission is a postseason bracket that every other FCS conference gets to enter.
The 2026 Cricket Celebration Bowl is set for Saturday, December 12 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. It will be the eleventh playing. The MEAC leads the series 7-3, South Carolina State is the defending champion, and the program that won the first four is no longer eligible to come back.
2026 Celebration Bowl: date, TV and details
| Date | Saturday, December 12, 2026 |
| Venue | Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta, Georgia |
| Address | 1 AMB Dr NW, Atlanta, GA 30313 |
| Edition | 11th playing |
| Matchup | MEAC champion vs SWAC champion |
| Title sponsor | Cricket Wireless |
| Operator | ESPN Events |
| Payout | $2 million, split $1 million per conference |
| TV | ABC, which has carried every playing |
| Trophy | Commemorates the first Black intercollegiate football game, played in 1892 |
The 2025 Celebration Bowl went four overtimes
South Carolina State beat Prairie View A&M 40-38 in the longest game the bowl has ever produced. The Bulldogs trailed by 21 and came all the way back. It ended when Ryan Stubblefield found Jordan Smith on a two-point conversion in the fourth overtime.
It was Prairie View’s first appearance in the game and its first shot at a national title, which is its own small piece of history. Prairie View was one of six Texas colleges that founded the SWAC in Houston in 1920, and it is the only charter member that never left. It took until the tenth Celebration Bowl for the league’s oldest program to play in one.
For South Carolina State it was a second trophy, and the first under Chennis Berry, who became the eighth coach to earn a Champions Circle jacket in ten playings.
Both MVPs came from the winning side, which is rare in a two-point game. Ryan Stubblefield took Offensive MVP and Brenyen Scott, a defensive back out of Ruskin, Florida, took Defensive MVP. Both have since graduated.
The crowd was 26,703, and that number is doing something worth paying attention to. More on it below.
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The MEAC leads 7-3, and the team that built the lead can’t come back
Ten games, twenty appearances, nine programs.
| Team | Record | Years |
| North Carolina A&T | 4-0 | 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 |
| South Carolina State | 2-1 | 2021, 2024, 2025 |
| Jackson State | 1-2 | 2021, 2022, 2024 |
| Alcorn State | 0-3 | 2015, 2018, 2019 |
| Grambling State | 1-1 | 2016, 2017 |
| North Carolina Central | 1-1 | 2016, 2022 |
| Florida A&M | 1-0 | 2023 |
| Howard | 0-1 | 2023 |
| Prairie View A&M | 0-1 | 2025 |
North Carolina A&T is the only unbeaten program with more than one trip, and the Aggies account for four of the MEAC’s seven wins. They also can’t get back. A&T left the MEAC and now plays in the CAA, which sends its champion into the FCS playoffs like everybody else. The winningest program in the game’s history is permanently out of the field, and the league it left is still carrying the record it built.
That cuts deeper than a realignment note. A&T was one of the seven historically Black institutions that sat down in Durham in 1969 and agreed to build the MEAC in the first place. A founding member won the first four editions of the league’s championship game and then left.
Alcorn State owns the other end of it: three appearances, three losses, and two of them to A&T.
Why Celebration Bowl teams don’t play in the FCS playoffs
This is the part that separates the Celebration Bowl from every other game in December.
The bowl is played during the FCS playoff tournament, so neither conference can send its champion to the bracket. That was a deliberate trade. When the game launched, the SWAC’s regular season already ran too late into the year for its champion to enter the playoffs. The MEAC gave up its automatic bid on purpose to send its champion to Atlanta instead.
The SWAC nearly went further. In June 2017 the league announced it would scrap its championship game entirely and hand the Celebration Bowl berth to the regular-season champion. A year later it reversed course and kept the title game, which is the arrangement that stands today.
Two million dollars gets split between the conferences, a million each. Every other FCS league is chasing a bracket. These two are chasing one Saturday.
Celebration Bowl records: 2019 still owns the book
North Carolina A&T 64, Alcorn State 44. That one night holds most of the offensive page:
- Most points by one team: 64
- Most combined points: 108
- Most total yards: 574
- Most passing yards: 364, by Kylil Carter, who also threw six touchdowns, another record
Alcorn’s Chris Blair put up 150 receiving yards in that game, and that is still the record too. Losing side, record intact.
Two other nights survive in the book. In the inaugural game, Tarik Cohen ran for 295 yards and three touchdowns for A&T, including an 83-yard score. Nobody has come close since, and Cohen is now in the Celebration Bowl Hall of Fame alongside Dr. Dennis Thomas, Pete Derzis and head coach Rod Broadway.
In 2022, Shedeur Sanders scored five all-purpose touchdowns and threw an 85-yard touchdown pass to Kevin Coleman Jr. Jackson State lost anyway, 41-34 in overtime, in Deion Sanders’ final game with the program.
The defensive entries belong to the two programs that keep meeting. In 2021 South Carolina State held Jackson State to 19 rushing yards in a 31-10 win. In 2024 Jackson State returned it, holding the Bulldogs to 178 total yards and seven points in a 28-7 win. Those two results share the largest margin of victory in the game’s history at 21 points, one in each direction.
Fuel Jackson State athletes → · Fuel Alcorn State athletes →
Celebration Bowl attendance has fallen four years running
Attendance peaked at 49,670 in 2022, when North Carolina Central played Jackson State. Since then it has dropped every single year.
| Year | Attendance |
| 2021 | 48,653 |
| 2022 | 49,670 |
| 2023 | 41,108 |
| 2024 | 36,823 |
| 2025 | 26,703 |
Last December was the second-smallest crowd the game has ever drawn, ahead of only 2017. That happened in a year when the game itself went four overtimes and produced a 21-point comeback.
It is worth being careful about what that number measures. Our look at the 27 most loyal fan bases in college football put the Magic City Classic crowd fifth in the country, at a game where a substantial share of the audience stays in its seats at halftime because the bands are the reason they came. The argument there applies directly here: the MEAC and SWAC are missing from national rankings because national media doesn’t cover them, not because the devotion isn’t there.
The SWAC has consistently led the entire FCS in attendance, and it does that in September and October, at home, with the bands. Whatever is happening in Atlanta in December is not a story about a disinterested audience.
A neutral-site game in Atlanta asks two fan bases to travel in December, three weeks after the classics season has already asked them to travel twice. That is a different question than whether anyone cares.
Celebration Bowl history: the trophy is 123 years older than the game
On December 27, 1892, Biddle College and Livingstone College played the first Black intercollegiate football game on the snowy front lawn of Livingstone’s campus in North Carolina. The young women of Livingstone’s industrial department made the uniforms and fixed cleats onto the players’ street shoes. The two teams pooled their money to buy a regulation football.
Biddle College is now Johnson C. Smith University. Livingstone still carries its own name. The Celebration Bowl trophy commemorates that afternoon and the players who were on the field for it, which makes it one of the few pieces of hardware in American sport that points at something older than the league awarding it.
The lineage runs forward too. This is the third postseason game the MEAC has helped build, after the Gold Bowl and the Heritage Bowl. The Pelican Bowl matched the two conferences in 1972, 1974 and 1975. The Heritage Bowl ran from 1991 through 1999. The Celebration Bowl was announced at the College Football Hall of Fame in March 2015 and played its first game that December at the Georgia Dome, where North Carolina A&T beat Alcorn State 41-34 in front of 35,528 people and 2.56 million more watching on ABC. It moved to Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2017 and has stayed there.
One year is missing. The 2020 game was canceled after the MEAC called off fall athletics and the SWAC pushed its season to the spring.
And if you want the strangest entry in the shared history of these two leagues, it isn’t in Atlanta at all. In September 1976, Grambling State beat Morgan State in front of 50,000 people at Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo, the first NCAA regular-season game played in Japan. We covered that one in 152 years of college football played outside the United States.
The road to Atlanta in 2026
Nobody has clinched anything. Here is what the field looks like.
South Carolina State enters as the standard-bearer, with Berry in year three and back-to-back conference titles behind him. The Bulldogs opened at home against Savannah State on August 29, then met Florida A&M on September 6 in the Orange Blossom Classic at Hard Rock Stadium, their first appearance in that game since 1973.
Howard opened a new era against Alabama A&M under head coach Ted White, a Bison alum and one of the most decorated players in program history. Howard won the MEAC in 2023 and reached the Celebration Bowl that December.
North Carolina Central traveled to Texas Southern in Week 1, exactly the kind of MEAC versus SWAC meeting that previews December.
Our MEAC Week 1 preview and SWAC Week 1 preview break down every opener, and the full MEAC schedule and SWAC schedule run week by week from here to the title games.
Three classics still stand between now and Atlanta, and each one can reshape the race:
- Southern Heritage Classic, September 12 in Memphis: Alcorn State vs Arkansas-Pine Bluff
- Magic City Classic, October 31 in Birmingham: Alabama A&M vs Alabama State
- Bayou Classic, November 28 in New Orleans: Grambling State vs Southern
The MEAC is led by commissioner Sonja Stills, the first female commissioner of a Division I HBCU conference, and the league pairs championship football with a gameday culture that no television contract manufactured.
2026 Celebration Bowl FAQ
When is the 2026 Celebration Bowl? Saturday, December 12, 2026, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The kickoff time has not been announced. The 2025 game kicked off at noon ET.
Who plays in the Celebration Bowl? The champion of the MEAC against the champion of the SWAC, the two Division I conferences made up of historically Black colleges and universities. The winner is recognized as the HBCU national champion.
Who won the 2025 Celebration Bowl? South Carolina State beat Prairie View A&M 40-38 in four overtimes, erasing a 21-point deficit. It was the longest game in the bowl’s history.
Which team has won the most Celebration Bowls? North Carolina A&T, with four titles in four appearances. The Aggies have since left the MEAC for the CAA, so they are no longer eligible for the game.
Why don’t Celebration Bowl teams play in the FCS playoffs? The game is played during the FCS playoff tournament. The MEAC gave up its automatic bid to send its champion to Atlanta, and the SWAC’s season already ran too late for its champion to enter the bracket.
Back the players before December
Two conferences, eighteen football programs, and one Saturday in Atlanta that decides all of it. Most of the athletes who will be on that field in December are not getting calls from brands, and the ones who decide the game are frequently not the ones anyone projected in September.
That is the whole argument for backing athletes on merit rather than on projected postseason slots.
Here is how it works. Pick your athlete from the verified college lineup, by school, sport or hometown. Fuel their NIL with $25, $50, $100 or more, handled securely through Stripe during the decision window. If the deal goes through, they get paid, with 90% going straight to the athlete. If it doesn’t, Stripe sends a full refund straight back to your card.
Start with the conference hubs and browse the rosters that are still in this: 1,452 verified MEAC athletes across ten schools, and 2,911 verified SWAC athletes across twelve. Rosters move, so the MEAC transfer tracker and SWAC transfer tracker follow the athletes who change addresses, and fuel is refunded when one of them leaves.
If you want the NIL picture for each league first, we broke down how fans support MEAC athletes and how fans support SWAC athletes, plus program-level guides for Jackson State, Howard, Florida A&M and Delaware State.
Before you argue about the rematch, settle it with the School Rivalry tool, which puts any two programs side by side on NIL, fan engagement, rankings and championships. The prediction board is open for every game on the schedule at 20 points a pick, and here is how the whole thing works if you’re new.
The 2026 Cricket Celebration Bowl kicks off Saturday, December 12 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, live on ABC.
