The Gator Bowl has been played every year since 1946. In eighty one editions it has left Jacksonville exactly once, in December 1994, when the old stadium was being torn down and the game was moved about 70 miles southwest to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville.
It is about to happen again.
EverBank Stadium is in the middle of a $1.4 billion renovation. The Gator Bowl will be played there on December 30, 2026, then move to Gainesville for the December 2027 edition, then come back to open the finished building the following year. Florida and Georgia have already packed up, taking their rivalry game to Atlanta this year and Tampa the next.
Which makes the 82nd TaxSlayer Gator Bowl the last big college football afternoon Jacksonville gets to keep for a while. It kicks off Wednesday, Dec. 30 at 11:30 a.m. ET on ESPN.
2026 Gator Bowl: the details
| Date | Wednesday, December 30, 2026 |
| Kickoff | 11:30 a.m. ET |
| TV | ESPN |
| Venue | Bill Gay Grounds at EverBank Stadium, Jacksonville, Florida |
| Address | 1 EverBank Stadium Dr, Jacksonville, FL 32202 |
| Edition | 82nd overall |
| Title sponsor | TaxSlayer |
| Operator | Gator Bowl Sports |
| Tie ins | ACC vs. SEC |
| Capacity | About 42,500 during construction |
This is the sixth oldest bowl in the country and the first one ever shown on national television. It has been sponsored by a car company, a steakhouse, another car company, a printer company, an insurance company and a tax software company, and it has been running continuously the whole time.
A smaller building than usual
The renovation has pulled roughly 27,000 seats out of the bowl, most of them in the upper deck, leaving about 42,500 for 2026.
That sounds like a problem and mostly is not. Last December’s game drew 31,802. The December before that drew 31,290. The upper deck has not been the deciding factor in a decade.
The bigger variable is the slot. Last year’s game was a Saturday night in primetime on ABC. This one is 11:30 in the morning on a Wednesday wedged between Christmas and New Year’s, which is a harder ask of anybody driving in from out of state.
What it does change is the ceiling. When this game gets the right team it gets very big: 84,129 for Bobby Bowden’s last game in 2010, and 62,200 for the one edition played in Gainesville. Neither of those is available this December. A tighter lower bowl with 42,000 people in it will look better on television than 31,000 spread across 68,000 seats, which may quietly be the best thing to happen to this bowl’s atmosphere in years.
Last December: Virginia finally won one
Virginia had been to two Gator Bowls and lost both, blown out by Oklahoma in 1991 and beaten by three by Texas Tech in 2008. The third trip was different. The Cavaliers beat Missouri 13-7 in front of 31,802, with quarterback Chandler Morris taking MVP in a game that produced twenty total points.
Missouri, for its part, keeps finding new ways to lose in this stadium. Their first Gator Bowl was a 24-23 loss to Clemson in 1949 on a late field goal. Their second was a loss to Maryland the next year. Their only win, in 1968, is the oddest game in the book: Missouri beat Alabama 35-10 while going 0 for 6 through the air for zero yards, still the fewest passing yards any team has managed here, and running it 82 times for 404 yards instead. Alabama finished with 45 rushing yards, also still a record.
Last December’s 13-7 was not even the quietest afternoon this bowl has produced. Tennessee beat Texas A&M 3-0 in 1957.
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Florida State has never lost a Gator Bowl
Seven appearances, six wins and a tie. No program with more than two trips here has a cleaner ledger.
The tie was a 17-17 draw with Penn State in December 1967, a genuinely strange afternoon: Florida State threw it 55 times, Kim Hammond completed 37 of his 53 attempts, and Ron Sellers caught 14 of them. The attempts and the catches are both still records. The win everyone remembers came on January 1, 2010, when Bobby Bowden coached the final game of his career against West Virginia, the program he ran before he ever got to Tallahassee. Florida State won 33-21, Bowden was carried off the field, and 84,129 people were there to watch it, still the largest crowd this bowl has ever drawn.
The Seminoles own the prettiest line in the book too. In January 1965, Steve Tensi threw five touchdown passes and Fred Biletnikoff caught four of them, finishing with thirteen catches, 192 yards and 24 points in a 36-19 win over Oklahoma. Six decades later, nobody has caught four touchdowns in this game again, and only one player has matched his 24.
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The Big Ten cannot solve this place
Thirteen appearances and three wins. That is a .231 mark, worst of any conference with a real sample here, and all three wins sit inside a 23 year window: Michigan in January 1991, Northwestern in January 2013, Nebraska in January 2014.
The Big Ten is not in the tie in this year anyway. The Gator Bowl draws ACC against SEC in 2026, the same arrangement it has had recently, after bowl officials elected to keep the whole postseason structure stable for one more season while the Playoff format gets sorted out.
The misery is not the Big Ten’s alone. West Virginia is 1-6 in seven trips, with the lone win coming in 2007 over Georgia Tech. South Carolina is 0-5. The cruelest detail belongs to the Gamecocks: in the 2022 loss to Notre Dame they scored 38, still the most points ever put up by a losing team in this game, and O’Donnell Fortune returned an interception 100 yards in the same night, also a record. They lost 45-38.
The game that got a coach fired
Every bowl has one story that outlives its result. This one is from December 29, 1978.
Clemson led Ohio State 17-15 in the closing minutes when nose guard Charlie Bauman stepped in front of a receiver, intercepted Art Schlichter and ran the ball out of bounds on the Ohio State sideline. Woody Hayes struck him with a forearm. Hayes had coached Ohio State for twenty eight years. He was fired the next day, before he had left Jacksonville.
The footnote nobody remembers: Schlichter, who threw the interception that started all of it, was still named Ohio State’s MVP that night.
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Every SEC school has been here. Three ACC schools have not.
Forty seven games and a 28-17-1 record. No conference has more history in Jacksonville than the SEC, and every current member has appeared in at least one Gator Bowl, including Texas and Oklahoma, whose appearances came decades before they joined the league.
The ACC sits at 35 games and 20-15, and the interesting names are the missing ones. Boston College has never played in a Gator Bowl. Neither has Cal, and neither has SMU, both of which joined the conference in 2024. Clemson has been here ten times, more than anyone, and has split them 5-5.
Browse ACC athletes or SEC athletes on RallyFuel →
Six Heisman winners have played in this game
Only two of them turned up holding the trophy, and both lost.
John David Crow came to Jacksonville in December 1957 having just won it and got shut out, 3-0, by Tennessee. George Rogers arrived as the reigning winner in December 1980 and was run over 37-9 by a Pitt team with a sophomore named Dan Marino on it.
The other four caught this game on the way up or on the way out. Earl Campbell was a Texas freshman in 1974, three years from his Heisman, and was named his team’s MVP anyway. Pat Sullivan won the January 1971 game for Auburn and collected his trophy the following December. Desmond Howard caught six passes for 167 yards and two touchdowns for Michigan in January 1991 and won it eleven months later. Lamar Jackson played here in 2017, a year after his.
The supporting cast runs deep. Archie Manning was named Ole Miss’s MVP in the same January 1971 game Sullivan won. Thurman Thomas was Oklahoma State’s MVP in back to back Gator Bowls, winning the first and losing the second. Vince Dooley was Auburn’s MVP at quarterback in 1954, then came back to coach Georgia in three of them.
Four records came out of the same game
January 1, 2008. Texas Tech 31, Virginia 28.
Graham Harrell dropped back 69 times, completed 44 and gained 407 yards. All three are still records. On the other sideline, Mikell Simpson broke off a 96 yard run, and that one stands too. Four entries in the book from a single afternoon, none of them touched in the eighteen bowls played since.
The rest of the list is worth a scan:
- Rushing yards: 236, Trayveon Williams, Texas A&M vs. NC State, 2018
- Receiving yards: 252, Andre Rison, Michigan State vs. Georgia, January 1989, on nine catches
- Longest touchdown pass: 99 yards, Tommy Armstrong to Quincy Enunwa, Nebraska vs. Georgia, 2014
- Most points by one team: 52, three times, most recently Ole Miss over Duke in January 2025
- Largest margin: 41, Syracuse 41-0 over Clemson in 1996, with Donovan McNabb taking MVP
One pattern worth noticing: the biggest individual days here keep coming from the losing sideline. Rison’s 252 yards came in a 34-27 loss. O’Donnell Fortune’s 100 yard interception return came in a loss. And in 2023, Kentucky’s Barion Brown was named co-MVP after a 100 yard return, in a game Clemson won 38-35.
Game week happens at the beach
Gasparilla has krewes on floats. Jacksonville has lifeguard chairs covered in Christmas lights.
The night before the game, both fan bases head out to the Seawalk Pavilion in Jacksonville Beach for back to back pep rallies, one per school, free and open to anybody who turns up. They are staged inside Deck the Chairs, a lighted sculpture exhibit that runs through December and is built entirely out of decorated lifeguard chairs. It is a strange tradition and a very good one, and it is the thing repeat visitors mention first.
The rest of the week is more conventional and still worth planning around. There is a free tailgate on the Flex Field outside the stadium that does not require a game ticket, a ticketed pregame party with a view of the field, a 5K through downtown on New Year’s Eve that benefits Gator Bowl Charities, and the city’s fireworks over the St. Johns River at midnight. The bowl posts the full game week schedule closer to kickoff.
The Florida December circuit
Florida stages five non playoff bowls, two of them in Orlando alone, and the same players keep turning up in them.
Sam Hartman won Gator Bowl MVP in December 2021, throwing Wake Forest past Rutgers 38-10. Twelve months later he won MVP of the Gasparilla Bowl in Tampa in his final game as a Demon Deacon. Philip Rivers won Gator Bowl MVP here in 2003 against Notre Dame and is still the only two time MVP of the Pop-Tarts Bowl, which shares Camping World Stadium in Orlando with the older and entirely separate Citrus Bowl.
NC State makes the same point in reverse. The Wolfpack are 2-0 in Tampa and 1-4 in Jacksonville, and that one win was the Rivers game.
Fuel Wake Forest athletes → · Fuel NC State athletes →
Back the players before Selection Day
Bowl assignments get argued about for three weeks and then forgotten by February. The players are the part that lasts, and they are the part you can actually do something about right now, before anybody knows who is going where.
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.
Browse ACC athletes or SEC athletes and fuel the ones you’re already watching.
The 82nd TaxSlayer Gator Bowl kicks off Wednesday, Dec. 30 at 11:30 a.m. ET on ESPN from EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville. Enjoy it. The next one is in Gainesville, where this bowl has been exactly once, in 1994, when a freshman named Peyton Manning went 12 of 19 for 189 yards and won it.
