TaxSlayer Gator Bowl will be Dec. 29, high noon at The Bank for annual SEC vs. ACC matchup
The 79th TaxSlayer Gator Bowl will be the first college football game on a holiday weekend this season.
The Gator Bowl announced Wednesday that its game matching an SEC vs. an ACC team will be Friday, Dec. 29, at TIAA Bank Field, with a noon kickoff on ESPN.
It marks the third time in four years that the sixth-oldest college bowl game will have an early start. It began at noon in 2020 and 11 a.m. in 2021, with a 3:30 p.m. kickoff last season. The game also has been played on either Dec. 30, Dec. 31 or Jan. 2 every year since 2016.
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Game dates and times are set by ESPN and the affiliate conferences.
The Gator Bowl also will be the first part of a football doubleheader in Jacksonville on New Year’s Weekend. The Jaguars will play host to the Carolina Panthers on Dec. 31 at 1 p.m., but the noon kick for the Gator Bowl, with two days before the Jags game, assures the city and ASM Global of enough turnaround time.
As recently as 2020, the Florida-Georgia game was played one day before a Jags home game.
“We really like our date and time slot,” said Gator Bowl president Greg McGarity. ”We’ll be leading ESPN’s coverage on a day that will end with the Peach Bowl and we think a lot of people are going to start their day and our New Year’s Weekend with our game.”
It also will be the third Gator Bowl in a row and the sixth in the last eight years played prior to New Year’s Day.
McGarity hopes to capitalize on the momentum generated from last year’s game in which Notre Dame beat South Carolina 45-38, breaking the game record for combined scoring by both teams.
The game was the fourth-highest attended of the bowl season (67,383), beating every game except two College Football playoffs and the Rose Bowl, and was the best crowd for a Gator Bowl since Mississippi State vs. Michigan in 2011.
The 2022 Gator Bowl also drew 5.76 million viewers, an increase of 66 percent over the previous year (Wake Forest vs. Rutgers) and the most-watched non-New Year’s Six game. It was the highest viewership for the Gator Bowl since Georgia vs. Nebraska in 2015.
“You can’t be certain you’re going to get that kind of a matchup every year on our tier,” McGarity said. ”But the more people come to your game, the more people go back and tell their friends what a great experience it was. The teams also do the same thing … tell everyone what a good time they had and what a great bowl site it was and how Jacksonville was a great host.”
The TaxSlayer Gator Bowl played its first game in 1946, between South Carolina and Wake Forest.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 79th TaxSlayer Gator Bowl set for noon on Dec. 29 at TIAA Bank Field
