Celebration Bowl remains a hook amid HBCU moves

The Celebration Bowl reconvenes Saturday in Atlanta after one pandemic cancellation, two years of waiting and three jarring conference reconfigurations. It looks different and maybe even misshapen, as does all college football from time to realigned time. Does it retain its churning meaning?

Two key pieces of evidence shout yes.

The Celebration Bowl, the HBCU national-title claim game, has a six-year contract with ESPN, and it has just gone and sold out the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, a first for this 7year-old, 6-edition-old event. Might it last a hundred years, as wise souls projected back in 2019 when life was sort of normal?

“Man, I sure hope so,” the retired coach Rod Broadway, who won it twice for North Carolina A&T, said by phone from North Carolina, “because it’s such a beautiful event.” He predicted it long could benefit from one aspect: “And I think the goal and the direction that it’s taken, it’s not just a bowl game, it’s a social event.”

Two years since a cloudy day outdoors and a goosebump day indoors in December 2019, when North Carolina A&T beat Alcorn State 64-44 and before the world went on hiatus, the annual match of HBCU conference champions will pit two first-timers with big fan bases: Southwestern Athletic

Conference champion Jackson State (11-1) against Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference champion South Carolina State (6-5). Yet it will pit an altered SWAC and a really altered MEAC.

In 2017, year No. 3 of the Celebration Bowl, the MEAC sent a champ from an 11team conference (North Carolina A&T), while the SWAC sent a champ from a 10-team conference (Grambling). Since then, five teams have left the MEAC, two of those for the SWAC, and the balance of football teams has tilted to an imbalance of 12-6 in the SWAC’s favor. Two teams — Hampton and Celebration Bowl dynasty North Carolina A&T (which won the bowl four times) — ventured to the Big South, or what some call “the mainstream.” Two teams, Florida A&M and Bethune-Cookman, left the MEAC for the SWAC.

It sounds a lot like … college football, an eccentric business in which one must adapt, and so the 2021 Celebration Bowl run-up sounds just as excited as … 2019.

“I’ve been trying to get to this thing for about 10 years now,” joked the 20-season South Carolina State mainstay coach Oliver “Buddy” Pough, at the bowl intro news conference. “And I can tell you that I fought for a good many years to keep this thing from happening. And then by the time I figured out that this was something that we ought to really buy into, you know, I think I’ve been punished for not being able to be on board at the beginning!”

He called it “something that’s going to be bigger and better as we continue to build,” and said his fresh thinking gained much prodding from one of the coaches who helped “punish” him, Broadway, who would come to dinner at Pough’s house, families all around, and “they got everybody in my house all juiced-up, about how great an atmosphere, and all the different kinds of things.”

Adding to a football importance widely agreed upon, and certainly visible in the faces of the winners on that field in 2019, this meaningful bowl in a country full of nutty bowls has its relationship with Atlanta. It has its intensive involvement from a mighty force: HBCU Greek life. It has its bands, in this case South Carolina State’s “Marching 101” and Jackson State’s “Sonic Boom of the South.” It has the rare component of fans of teams who are not playing, as noted Broadway: “I saw Grambling (fans) there. I saw South Carolina State. Fans from all over the league. North Carolina Central. All of them were there.”

And now it has Jackson State coach Deion Sanders, among those rare souls who can attract eyeballs just by standing on the sideline, especially after Wednesday when Jackson State jostled the whole college landscape by landing prized recruit Travis Hunter, a suburban Atlantan no less.