Why Jackson State football was chosen to play in SWAC Classic in Birmingham next three years
The new SWAC Classic game at Legion Field in Birmingham will feature Jackson State football in each of its first three seasons. The Tigers will take on Arkansas Pine-Bluff in 2022, followed by Southern in 2023 and 2024.
The idea for the game came after Bethune-Cookman and Florida A&M switched from the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference to the Southwestern Athletic Conference. Both Florida schools joined the SWAC East, and JSU's rival, Alcorn State, moved to the SWAC West.
The SWAC's eight-game conference schedule allows for one rivalry game from the opposite division to be played every season. Alcorn is the designated rival for JSU to play every year, guaranteeing the rivalry stays intact.
The other schools get swapped off the schedule on a rotating basis, where a pair of schools go two years without playing each other each cycle.
Jackson State also has a huge rivalry with Southern, and since JSU and Southern were scheduled to rotate off each others' schedule in 2023 and 2024, JSU athletics director Ashley Robinson and Southern athletics director Roman Banks went to the SWAC to see what could be done to make the game happen those years.
"If you know the history of Southern and Jackson State, that's a big rivalry," Robinson said. "For me, I think it's probably even bigger than the Alcorn rivalry when you start looking at butts in the seats and revenue, and things that happen around the game. So the AD (Banks) and I worked together to say, 'Hey, we can't go those two years without Southern and Jackson State playing.'"
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The answer was to play a classic at a neutral site. And Birmingham, which hosts the SWAC basketball tournament and is home to SWAC headquarters, was a natural fit.
"The commissioner and the city of Birmingham always said they wanted a game in Birmingham," Robinson said. "And so we said we'll go to Birmingham those two years and make it a classic. And the City of Birmingham offered free rent, free operations costs, and all the gates go to both schools, so you're talking about potentially over a million dollars of revenue for each school for those two years which makes a lot of sense for us."
It's an opportunity to make significant revenue, keep the rivalry going and avoids the need to play a game against the Football Bowl Subdivision.
"It gives us an opportunity to create classics," Robinson said. "You're looking at keeping the revenue in the conference, and keeping the tradition going and continuing to play those teams. It wasn't a situation like a lot of people thought that we were taking away home games for Jackson or Baton Rouge. It was simply two years that we were not going to play each other at all."
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Here's why Jackson State football will be in SWAC Classic next 3 years
