Birmingham Bowl Renews SEC Agreement Through 2025

BIRMINGHAM, AL - Birmingham will continue to host a Southeastern Conference team in its annual bowl game for the next six years, after the conference and ESPN Events reached an agreement this week. The Birmingham Bowl has been played since 2006 at Legion Field.

The SEC will maintain its current bowl selection process, in which the Citrus Bowl has the first selection of available SEC teams after any conference school has qualified for the playoff.

The SEC Pool of Six consists of the Outback Bowl, Gator Bowl, Music City Bowl, Texas Bowl and Liberty Bowl. After the Pool of Six selection process is complete, the Birmingham Bowl and Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl will collaborate on the selection of remaining eligible teams each year.

The game currently features teams from the SEC and the American Athletic Conference. Should either of these conferences not fulfill their bowl commitments, a team from C-USA or the Mid-American Conference will take their place, provided it is bowl eligible. Otherwise, the game will choose an at-large team. This happened in 2008, when the SEC was unable to send a team and the bowl selected ACC team North Carolina State to face Rutgers from the Big East despite the fact that the bowl had an arrangement with the Sun Belt Conference at the time and it had at least one bowl-eligible team it could send.

The 2018 match-up had Memphis from the American Athletic Conference up against Wake Forest from the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The Birmingham Bowl is one of the events that will likely move to the new Protective Stadium downtown when the 55,000-seat stadium is completed, reportedly by 2021.