2027 Citrus Bowl: The Best Game That Isn’t a Playoff Game

Peyton Manning was named MVP of the Citrus Bowl on New Year’s Day 1997. His nephew Arch won the same award on New Year’s Eve 2025.

In between, this game collected Bo Jackson, Doug Flutie, Tim Tebow, Plaxico Burress, Matthew Stafford and a receiver named Warren Holloway, who caught the only touchdown of his four year career on the last play of a Citrus Bowl. That is the whole pitch. The Citrus Bowl gets first pick of the Big Ten and the SEC once the Playoff field is set, which means most years it is the most talented football game of the postseason that nobody is calling a semifinal. As of 2019 it also paid out more than any bowl outside the Playoff.

The 81st Cheez-It Citrus Bowl kicks off Saturday, Jan. 2, 2027 at noon ET on ABC.

2027 Citrus Bowl: the details

A quirk of the calendar: there is no Citrus Bowl at all during the 2026 calendar year. The last one was December 31, 2025 and the next is January 2, 2027. It has happened before, between the December 1985 game and January 1, 1987. This is also the first Saturday Citrus Bowl since 2022.

Orlando is a construction site too

Camping World Stadium is in the middle of a $400 million renovation due to finish in 2027, and the game will be played at reduced capacity while the work goes on.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Jacksonville is doing the same thing on a bigger budget, which is why the Gator Bowl leaves town after this December. Both of Florida’s oldest bowls are spending this postseason inside a building with cranes on it. The two cities are about to trade problems as well: when EverBank Stadium closes for the 2027 season, the Jaguars move into Camping World Stadium.

The Citrus Bowl can absorb the hit. It drew 47,316 last time and 47,129 the time before, well down from the 72,940 that Florida and Penn State pulled in 1998, still the game’s attendance record. The upper deck has not been the binding constraint here in twenty years.

Last December: Arch Manning finished it off

Texas beat Michigan 41-27 on New Year’s Eve, and Arch Manning took MVP in front of 47,316.

It was the eightieth edition and a typical one: two ranked teams, one from each conference, neither in the Playoff, playing a game that would have been a marquee bowl in any year before the bracket existed. Michigan has been here seven times, more than any other program, and is 4-3. Texas had never played in it before.

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It started with an Elks Lodge and a hundred dollars a head

The Citrus Bowl is the seventh oldest bowl in the country. It began in 1947 as the Tangerine Bowl, funded by members of Elks Lodge #1079 in Orlando who each put up $100 to cover expenses. They staged it in a Works Progress Administration project from 1936 that had cost $115,000 to build and seated 10,000. Catawba beat Maryville 31-6 in front of 9,000 of them. By 1952 the game had a nickname, the Little Bowl with the Big Heart, because the proceeds all went to charity.

For two decades it was a small college game. Catawba won the first two. East Texas State won three. The 1955 game finished 7-6, the 1954 and 1956 games ended in ties, and crowds ran between four and thirteen thousand.

Then Toledo arrived and won three straight, in 1969, 1970 and 1971, with quarterback Chuck Ealey recognized as the game’s standout all three times. He is the only player to be honored three times here. Two others have done it twice: Brad Cousino of Miami of Ohio and Anthony Thomas of Michigan.

The bowl went major college in 1968, moved to New Year’s Day in 1987, and locked into the Big Ten against the SEC starting with the 1992 season. This January marks thirty five years of that arrangement.

The years the invitations were turned down

Part of the early history is harder, and worth stating plainly.

Undefeated Hillsdale College declined its invitation to the January 1956 game after bowl officials said its four Black players would not be allowed to play. Two years later, Buffalo received its first bowl bid. The stadium was run by an association whose rules barred integrated events, and when it would not waive them, Buffalo’s players voted unanimously to stay home rather than play without halfback Willie Evans and end Mike Wilson. Buffalo did not become bowl eligible again for fifty years.

The rule had changed by December 1966, when Morgan State, coached by Earl Banks, became the first historically Black college to play in this game and win it, beating West Chester 14-6. Willie Lanier, later a Hall of Fame linebacker, was its MVP.

The Transplant Bowl

In 1973 the Tangerine Bowl was played in Gainesville, the only time in eighty editions it has been staged outside Orlando. It was also the one year the Tangerine Bowl was not played at the Tangerine Bowl, which is what the stadium was called at the time.

The reason was arithmetic. The Orlando stadium sat 17,000, an expansion had stalled over legal problems, and after East Carolina withdrew from consideration the bowl was left with one at-large bid to fill. Organizers invited Florida and moved the game to the Gators’ own field, which took special permission from the NCAA. Both teams stayed and practiced in Orlando all week and were bused ninety miles north on game day.

They arrived to a near record low of 25 degrees. Miami of Ohio, unbeaten and better suited to the cold, held Florida to one score and won 16-7 in front of 37,234. One of the Miami players that afternoon was Ron Zook, who would later coach Florida.

The scare over losing the game permanently got the Orlando renovation moving again.

Orlando is not the only Florida bowl with a Gainesville chapter. The Gator Bowl played its 1994 edition at that same stadium and goes back there in December 2027.

The 1968 game still holds four records

December 27, 1968. Richmond 49, Ohio 42, in front of 16,114 people.

Buster O’Brien threw for 447 yards and Walker Gillette caught 242 of them. Both still stand. So do Richmond’s 32 first downs, the 91 combined points, and Ohio’s 42 in a losing effort, which remains the most any beaten team has scored here.

The rest of the book:

• Most points, one team: 63, LSU vs. Purdue, 2023, in a record 56 point rout
• Rushing yards: 234, Fred Taylor, Florida, 1998
• Passing touchdowns: 5, Aaron Murray, Georgia, 2013
• Longest interception return: 99 yards, Quad Wilson, LSU, 2023
• Attendance: 72,940, Florida vs. Penn State, 1998

Four finishes worth knowing

January 1, 2005. Iowa trailed LSU with time for one play. Drew Tate hit Warren Holloway on a 56 yard touchdown as the clock expired for a 30-25 win, the only touchdown Holloway scored in four years at Iowa.

December 22, 1984. Georgia and Florida State, Vince Dooley against Bobby Bowden, tied 17-17 after Kevin Butler’s 70 yard field goal attempt fell just short as time ran out. Walt Disney World did the halftime show and NBC carried it, the first time a major network broadcast this game.

January 1, 1991. Georgia Tech came in 10-0-1 and ranked second, beat Nebraska 45-21 behind 318 total yards from Shawn Jones, and was voted the 1990 national champion in the UPI poll. Very few games outside the sport’s biggest bowls have ever produced a national champion.

January 1, 2008. Michigan 41, Florida 35, in Lloyd Carr’s final game, in front of 69,748. Tim Tebow, the reigning Heisman winner, put up 211 total yards and four touchdowns and lost. The Gator Bowl has its own version of that story, and its own coach’s farewell two years later.

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The Big Ten does better here than in Jacksonville

Worth noting if you have read our Gator Bowl guide: the Big Ten is 3-10 all time in Jacksonville and cannot get out of its own way there.

Orlando is kinder, though not by a huge margin. The Big Ten is 14-20 here, the SEC 26-15-1. Tennessee owns the game at 5-1, which once moved Steve Spurrier to point out that “You can’t spell ‘Citrus’ without U-T!” The Volunteers have the most wins of any team, including a 35-0 shutout of Iowa in January 2024.

Florida, playing less than two hours from campus, is 2-4.

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One more thing about Orlando

Camping World Stadium hosts two bowls, and they are not the same game.

The Citrus Bowl is the old one, dating to 1947, and it takes the top Big Ten and SEC teams outside the Playoff. The Pop-Tarts Bowl is the newer one, played this year on Tuesday, Dec. 29 at 5:30 p.m. ET on ESPN, and it draws from a different pool. Florida Citrus Sports runs both.

They get mixed up constantly, and the naming history is why. This game was the Tangerine Bowl through 1982. The other game was also called the Tangerine Bowl, from 2001 to 2003, with no connection to the first one. The stadium was named the Tangerine Bowl too, from 1947 to 1975, then briefly the Citrus Bowl, then the Florida Citrus Bowl for thirty years. Both games have been sponsored by Cheez-It. Philip Rivers is the only two time MVP of the Pop-Tarts Bowl. Chuck Ealey is the only three time honoree of the Citrus Bowl. Different games, different trophies, same parking lot.

Back the players before Selection Day

The Citrus Bowl field is not set until the Playoff bracket is, which means the two teams playing on January 2 spend December finding out they came up a spot short. They are the best teams in two conferences, and they will have spent a month being described as the ones who did not quite make it.

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The 81st Cheez-It Citrus Bowl kicks off Saturday, Jan. 2, 2027 at noon ET on ABC from Camping World Stadium in Orlando. Eighty years ago it took a hundred dollars a head from an Elks Lodge to get the thing off the ground.