Breaking down the Celebration Bowl split: The SWAC and MEAC reportedly will split $2 million for participating in Saturday’s Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl.
“It’s a pretty good deal for us,” A&T athletics director Earl Hilton told the News and Record.
According to the newspaper, both schools will keep revenue from ticket sales. North Carolina A&T will take home 70 percent from a $800,000 haul. About 30 percent will go to the MEAC and be split among each member school.
“We can spend it on anything, but we’ll likely look first at the football program,” Hilton said. “Because, obviously, we hope this isn’t our only trip to the bowl game. We’d like to make it a regular thing.”
Bowl game brings more attention than FCS playoffs: The Celebration Bowl will officially kickoff the bowl season. Alcorn State Athletic Director Derek Horne said the school playing on network television has the potential to raise the profile of the university on a larger scale than the FCS postseason tournament.
“You don’t know whether the (playoff) game will be on TV or not,” Horne told HBCU Sports. “We have the opportunity to be on a platform where we are exposed to the nation.”
Each of this year’s first-round FCS playoffs games were broadcast on ESPN3, the cable network’s internet-streaming site.
Braves making most of time off: It’s been 10 days since Alcorn State took the field after capturing the school’s second consecutive SWAC championship with a 49-21 win over Grambling State on Dec. 5.
The Alcorn State coaching staff is hoping the rest will serve them well heading into the Celebration Bowl.
“Most cases you would say that, yeah, I’ve been eager to get this game going, but we were pretty banged up,” offensive coordinator Fred Kaiss told the Clarion-Ledger. “The few days we gave them off before we started practice, I think was a blessing. The biggest thing I was nervous about was we were really beat up going into the Grambling game … but we came out of the game better than when they went in. And we had a few days to let them heal up, so we’re in good shape.”
That payout is lower than I expected, but not horrible. Most I-AA schools get about that much when they play money games against I-A schools.
I was told that the SWAC conference and other member schools will split 200k and 800k goes directly to the school that represents the conference. That school is responsible for selling roughly 160k in tickets and hence, if school sales all of its tickets, then they could bring home 800k minus travel expenses and perks for the team.