College Sports
Jacksonville's football bowl game, the Gator Bowl, began in 1946. The Florida Gators and Georgia Bulldogs have played their annual Florida–Georgia game, commonly known as "The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party", in Jacksonville every year since 1933, save a two-year hiatus caused by the razing of the Gator Bowl Stadium and construction of the EverBank Field. The Florida State Seminoles have also held individual regular season games there, and in 1964 Georgia Tech and Navy played a regular season game there. The latter game was notable because 1963 Heisman Trophy winner and NFL Hall of Famer Roger Staubach played quarterback for Navy. Georgia Tech won the game, 17-0. On September 2, 1989 Florida State played Southern Mississippi in the regular season opener at the Gator Bowl. Southern Miss quarterback Brett Favre led his team to a 30-26 upset of the heavily-favored Seminoles.
Jacksonville was the host city for the Atlantic Coast Conference championship games in football through 2007.
In March 2006, Jacksonville was a host site for the first round of the NCAA Division I Basketball Championship. The games were held at the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena. The eventual national champion Florida Gators emerged from the Jacksonville regional.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Jacksonville
Famous quotes containing the words college and/or sports:
“I never feel so conscious of my race as I do when I stand before a class of twenty-five young men and women eager to learn about what it is to be black in America.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American college professor. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B3 (July 27, 1994)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)