Gearing up for bowl season in Atlanta
ATLANTA’S BOWL GAMES
Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl
Who: North Carolina A&T (9-2) vs. Alcorn State (9-3)
When: Noon Dec. 19
Where: Georgia Dome
TV: ABC
Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl
Who: Florida State (10-2) vs. Houston (12-1)
When: Noon Dec. 31
Where: Georgia Dome
TV: ESPN
PEACH BOWL: FLORIDA STATE VS. HOUSTON
About Florida State (10-2, 6-2 ACC): Ranked No. 9 by the College Football Playoff selection committee. … Has held opponents to 15.8 points per game, fifth fewest in FBS. … Led on offense by sophomore tailback Dalvin Cook, who has 1,658 rushing yards this season.
Quoting FSU coach Jimbo Fisher: "I think we've had a tremendous season. We had a very young football team, and it has grown all year and gotten better and better."
About Houston (12-1, 7-1 AAC): Ranked No. 18 by the playoff selection committee. … Defeated Temple in the American Athletic Conference Championship game. … Averaging 40.6 points per game, 12th most in FBS. … Led by quarterback Greg Ward Jr., who has 2,590 passing yards and 1,041 rushing yards.
Quoting Houston coach Tom Herman: "We understand the level of competition has bumped up in this game, but I think our guys do have confidence."
CELEBRATION BOWL: ALCORN STATE VS. NORTH CAROLINA A&T
About Alcorn State (9-3, 7-2 SWAC): Defeated Grambling State 49-21 in the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship game, avenging an overtime loss to Grambling during the regular season. … Relies heavily on tailback Darryan Ragsdale, who has 1,144 rushing yards this season.
Quoting Alcorn State coach Jay Hopson: "In FCS football, we kind of set ourselves apart with a bowl game. Our young men get an opportunity to experience that FBS experience with a bowl game."
About North Carolina A&T (9-2, 7-1 MEAC): Shared the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference title with Bethune-Cookman and North Carolina Central, but won the tiebreaker by having the highest Sagarin rating of the three teams. … Led by running back Tarik Cohen, who has 1,248 rushing yards.
Quoting North Carolina A&T coach Rod Broadway: "It was an up-and-down season, but I thought our guys responded well. We overcame a lot of injuries; we played three quarterbacks. But we're here."
The head coaches in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl can only hope their trips to Atlanta late this month turn out a lot better than their last notable visits here.
Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher watched in horror Oct. 24 as his previously unbeaten team lost at Georgia Tech 22-16 on a blocked field-goal attempt that Tech returned 78 yards for a touchdown as time expired. And Houston coach Tom Herman’s recruiting trip here as an Ohio State assistant in January 2014 might have been even worse: He was stuck in a rental car on metro Atlanta interstates for 19 hours during the winter storm that famously paralyzed the region.
“I better bring my snow tires,” Herman joked to reporters upon receiving the Peach Bowl berth.
Florida State and Houston provide a compelling bowl matchup that reflects Atlanta’s increased prominence in college football’s postseason landscape. And yet this game pales in comparison with two that bound for Atlanta in the near future: a College Football Playoff semifinal next season and the national championship game the season after that.
“There’s some great college football coming here over the next two, three years,” Peach Bowl President Gary Stokan said.
More immediately, there are two games coming here in the next three weeks, with Atlanta now a dual-bowl town.
The Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl — a new event matching the champions of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and the Southwestern Athletic Conference, two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) leagues — debuts in the Georgia Dome at noon Dec. 19, the first day of this bowl season. North Carolina A&T will represent the MEAC against Alcorn State of the SWAC in a game that will be televised on ABC.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity,” Celebration Bowl Executive Director John Grant said. “Atlanta opens the college football bowl season with … the only game on national television in that time slot. We think that means a lot.”
Both North Carolina A&T coach Rod Broadway and Alcorn State coach Jay Hopson said they are thrilled to bring their teams to Atlanta for the game. Florida State’s Fisher and Houston’s Herman said the same about their coming trips to Atlanta — despite what happened the most-recent time they were here.
Florida State, which won the national championship two seasons ago and lost in the playoff semifinals last season, carried a 30-game regular-season winning streak into the October game at Tech. The score was tied 16-16 when the Seminoles attempted a long field goal with six seconds remaining. Tech blocked the kick, and the Yellow Jackets’ Lance Austin returned it 78 yards for a touchdown to end the game.
“It was such a tough loss and a very dynamic way to do it,” Fisher said last week. “I think from that point we could have … pouted and felt sorry for ourselves and not done anything. Or we could have learned from it and grown, (which) I think we did.”
FSU won four of its five remaining regular-season games, losing only to No. 1 Clemson, and now finds itself bound for a New Year’s Eve bowl game 1.6 miles from its season’s low point.
Herman was Ohio State’s offensive coordinator when he came to Georgia on the January 2014 recruiting trip. Like thousands of others, he wound up trapped in his car on the icy interstates.
“Just passed the 17 hour mark stuck in the car,” Herman posted on Twitter at one point during the ordeal. “Don’t know what’s going on up ahead. Hope everyone is ok. We’ve traveled 1.5 miles in 10 hrs.”
After 19 hours, he abandoned the rental car on the side of the road, leaving the keys in it, and set out to walk with his luggage the final four miles or so to Hartsfield-Jackson. About two miles — and several falls — later, he hitched a ride with a Delta employee, who was able to navigate the rest of the way to the airport.
Things have been going well for Herman since then.
He remained at Ohio State as the Buckeyes won last season’s national championship, then took over a Houston program that has gone 12-1 this season under its first-year head coach. The Cougars won the American Athletic Conference championship to secure a Peach Bowl berth as the highest ranked team outside the five power conferences.
“The magnitude of it for the program, I think it’s huge,” Herman said. “You can’t buy the kind of advertisement that playing in this game will give the University of Houston and our program.”
Alcorn State also has a bit of a horror story from its last trip to Atlanta: a 69-6 loss at Georgia Tech in this season’s opener Sept. 3.
“We certainly didn’t get off to our best start the first week of the season,” Hopson said in grand understatement.
But Alcorn State — which, like North Carolina A&T, is an FCS team — has won nine of 11 games since then, including a 49-21 victory in the SWAC championship game to clinch a return to Atlanta for the Celebration Bowl.
“That was a goal that we had. We said, ‘We want to start the season in Atlanta, and we want to finish it in Atlanta,’” Hopson said. “We battled through some adversities, but we really battled through strong. … So we’re excited to be back.”
The Celebration Bowl is one of 13 bowl games owned and operated by ESPN. Although the game will air on corporate sibling ABC, ESPN’s “SportsCenter” plans to broadcast live from the Georgia Dome for the two hours preceding the game.
ESPN has a six-year agreement with the SWAC and MEAC to play the bowl here: the first two games in the Georgia Dome and the next four in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which is slated to open in 2017.
“We just felt like if we were going to put the game on, Atlanta was the one and only place that we would do it,” SWAC Commissioner Duer Sharp said.
About the Author
Tim Tucker, a long-time AJC sports reporter, often writes about the business side of the games. He also had stints as the AJC's Braves beat writer, UGA beat writer, sports notes columnist and executive sports editor. He was deputy managing editor of America's first all-sports newspaper, The National Sports Daily.
