Liberty Bowl

The Liberty Bowl is an annual U.S. American college football bowl game played in December of each year from 1959 to 2007 and in January in 2009 and 2010. The Liberty Bowl was sponsored by AXA Financial and was known as the AXA Liberty Bowl from 1997 to 2003. Since 2004, the game has been sponsored by Memphis-based auto parts retailer AutoZone, and is now called the AutoZone Liberty Bowl.

A. F. “Bud” Dudley, a former Villanova University athletic-director, created the Liberty Bowl in Philadelphia in 1959. The game was played at Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium. It was the only cold-weather bowl game of its time, and was plagued by poor attendance. The 1963 game between Mississippi State and NC State drew less than 10,000 fans and absorbed a loss in excess of $40,000. The first Liberty Bowl game was the most successful of the five held in Philadelphia, as 38,000 fans watched Penn State beat Alabama 7–0 in 1959.

Atlantic City convinced Dudley to move his game from Philadelphia to Atlantic City's Convention Hall for 1964 and guaranteed Dudley $25,000. It would be the first Bowl Game played indoors. AstroTurf was still in its developmental stages and was unavailable for the game. Convention Hall was equipped with a 4-inch-thick (100 mm) grass surface with two inches of burlap underneath it (as padding) on top of cement. To keep the grass growing, artificial lighting was installed and kept on 24 hours a day. The entire process cost about $16,000. End-zones were only 8 yards long. 6,059 fans saw Utah rout West Virginia. Dudley was paid $25,000 from Atlantic City businessmen, $60,000 from the gate, and $95,000 from television revenues, for $10,000 net profit.

Dudley moved the game to Memphis in 1965, where it has made its home at what became Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium to much larger crowds and has established itself as one of the oldest non-BCS bowls. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Liberty Bowl offered an automatic invitation to the winner of the Commander-in-Chief's Trophy, if that team was bowl eligible. From 1996–2004, the regular season champion of Conference USA served as the host team. Since 2005, the winner of the C-USA Championship game has received the berth, with 2011 being an exception.

In 1996 and 1997, the opponent for the C-USA champion was a team from the Big East Conference. In 1998, C-USA faced either the Western Athletic Conference champion or an at-large team, taking the WAC champion if the Cotton Bowl Classic had not already done so. From 1999 to 2005, the opponent for the C-USA champion was the Mountain West Conference champion. There were two exceptions:

• In 2004, Mountain West Champion Utah qualified for the BCS. In their place, the Liberty Bowl chose WAC champion Boise State.
• In 2005, Mountain West Champion TCU chose to play in the Houston Bowl instead of the Liberty Bowl. At-large WAC team Fresno State took their place.

In 1999, the Mountain West Conference did not have an outright champion, as three teams tied for the conference lead. The conference's bid for the game was given to Colorado State.

From the 2006 through the 2010 football seasons, the game matched the Conference USA champion with a team from the SEC. However, controversy has emerged following a report by the Orlando Sentinel where it was revealed that the SEC controlled who it would play "every two years"; as such, Conference USA champion Southern Miss was not chosen for the bowl (as they normally would have been)." This new agreement results in a 2011 matchup between Vanderbilt University from the SEC and the University of Cincinnati from the Big East Conference, thus ending a 16 consecutive year Conference USA representation.

Also, starting in 2010–11, if the SEC does not have enough eligible teams to fill all of its bowl obligations, the Liberty Bowl can also select a Big East team.

The game is televised nationally on ESPN, and is carried nationwide by ESPN Radio, and internationally by ESPN International.

The most recent edition of the Liberty Bowl was played on December 31, 2011. The game matched Coaches' Poll #24 Cincinnati against Vanderbilt and unlike most minor bowls aired on the broadcast network ABC rather than its cable brandmate ESPN. The game returned to December at the end of 2010 after being played on January 2 in 2009 and 2010, the only times since the bowl was founded in 1959 that it had a non-December date. (Technically there was no 2008 game, as the game after the 2008 season was played January 2, 2009.) Cincinnati defeated Vanderbilt in a second-half comeback.