Kentucky’s in the Gator Bowl. If you wanna go, you might want to buy tickets now.
Kentucky for the second time in five years will play in the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl.
The bowl is played in Jacksonville, the nearest major city in Florida to the commonwealth, which isn’t a place the Wildcats frequent.
Can I go?
Yes. Seating for Jacksonville Jaguars games this season was capped at 25 percent of the stadium’s capacity. If that holds for the Gator Bowl, then about 17,000 fans would be able to attend this year’s game. Tickets can be purchased at taxslayergatorbowl.com.
The game hasn’t had fewer than 30,000 fans in attendance since 1954. That’s guaranteed this season, but it could make this a hot ticket if fans are willing to travel on short notice.
What’s the Gator Bowl and how important is it?
It is one of the “Pool of Six” bowls with whom the Southeastern Conference has contracted to send a team to each season, along with the Armed Forces Bowl, Liberty Bowl, Music City Bowl, Outback Bowl and Texas Bowl. The Gator Bowl is played at TIAA Bank Field, home of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
From a raw dollars perspective, among the “Pool of Six” bowls, the Music City Bowl in 2018 ranked last with a total payout of $3,168,292 split equally between winner Texas A&M and loser N.C. State. That number is somewhat irrelevant, though, as far UK is concerned: it will retain a portion of its payout to cover travel and other bowl-related expenses but the majority will be put into a pool that will be distributed evenly to all 14 SEC teams at a later date (that applies to every postseason game in which the SEC has a participant, including the College Football Playoff).
It of course doesn’t have the prestige of the Sugar Bowl or the Citrus Bowl, but outside of the College Football Playoff — which determines, y’know, a national champion — the only “importance” of any bowl in the sport boils down to one or several of the following: bragging rights, ending the season on a high note, having 15 extra practices before a break sets in, possibly achieving a recruiting edge and having one final opportunity to showcase your seniors and juniors who might leave early for the NFL Draft.
More than anything, for Kentucky, it’s another chance to keep chipping away at the notion, nationally, that the only sport it plays is basketball. This game will probably attract more eyeballs than any UK regular-season game, so an opportunity to give ’em something special to see is never a bad thing.
How did the Gator Bowl come to be?
This will be the 76th edition of the Gator Bowl, which has been played every year since 1946. According to its website, it is the sixth-oldest continuously operating college football bowl game and was the first to be televised nationwide.
Wake Forest defeated South Carolina 26-14 in the first Gator Bowl in front of only 7,362 fans (bowl co-founder Charles Hilty Sr. was a friend of Peahead Walker, then the head coach at Wake Forest, which wanted to settle a 13-13 tie with the Gamecocks played earlier in the season).
From 2015-2017 the bowl was formally known as the TaxSlayer Bowl (the 2016 season was UK’s only previous appearance) but it re-adopted the Gator Bowl name during the 2018 season.
TaxSlayer has been the bowl’s title sponsor since 2012. It previously has been sponsored by Mazda (1986-1991), Outback (1992-1994), Toyota (1995-2007), Konica Minolta (2008-2010) and Progressive Insurance (2011).
Last year’s Gator Bowl attracted only 61,789 attendees, its best crowd since a 2011 meeting between Michigan and Mississippi State.
Any interesting history behind TaxSlayer?
One of the nation’s leading online tax preparation websites started off as a side service.
Rhodes-Murphy & Co., a full-service tax firm that still continues to operate in Georgia and South Carolina, formed a subsidiary called Rhodes Computer Services in 1989. Four years later it began selling its software, TaxSlayer Pro, to tax professionals; the software was named after an email address used by Jimmy Rhodes, then the president and CEO.
Development of TaxSlayer.com, directed toward individual consumers, began in 1998; in 2017, it helped file more than 10 million federal and state tax returns.
This story was originally published December 20, 2020 at 5:33 PM.
