Gator Bowl Tickets

About Gator Bowl

From 1996 to 2006, the bowl was officially titled as the Toyota Gator Bowl, as Toyota was the title sponsor for the game. But for the 2007 game it had no sponsors which actually did not make any difference to its popularity. Currently the game is being sponsored by Konica Minolta and is named as Konica Minolta Gator Bowl. As per the The Big Bowl Football Guide authored by Anthony C. DiMarco, the credit for the concept is given to Charles Hilty, Sr. He along with Ray McCarthy, Maurice Cherry and W.C. Ivey had invested up to $10,000 to underwrite the inaugural game.

Before the Gator Bowl Stadium partially demolished in 1993, because of the construction of ALLTEL Stadium at the same place, the game was always played there. In the 1994 game, the Tennessee Volunteers defeated Virginia Tech, it was the first ever victory for Tennessee in Gainesville since 1971. Tennessee could not win a match against the undefeated Florida Gators until 2001. On 1 January 1996 the subsequent games were held at the ALLTEL Stadium. In the year 2004, Gator Bowl games took place at Gainesville, Florida.

In the initial years of this bowl game, that is basically from 1946 to 1952, the team it featured was from the Southern Conference that played against an at-large opponent. This all began with the 1953 game, when they actually switched to featuring only a Southeastern Conference (SEC) team in opposition to an at-large opponent. The games that were played from 1976 to 1995 usually, but not always had a team playing from the south-east part of the country and that too against a team that came from some another part of the country. In 10 of the 20 games there were teams from the ACC that used to play.

The Gator Bowl traditionally began to host the second-place ACC to counter the second-place Big East team from 1996 and continued till 2006. With the 2007 game, the Gator Bowl started hosting the third-place ACC team against either the Big East, Big 12 or Notre Dame. They moved ahead with this decision to take the Big East's place in this event.