Why to watch the 2016 Celebration Bowl, the actual first game of bowl season

The first FBS bowl of the college football postseason kicks off at 2 p.m. ET on Saturday, when UTSA and New Mexico meet in Albuquerque.

But bowl season itself begins two hours before that. At noon on ABC, Grambling State and NC Central will kick off in the Georgia Dome for the second annual Air Force Reserve Celebration Bowl. The winner is the 2016 black college national champion.

Here are four things you need to know about the official first game of bowl season.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Celebration Bowl executive director John Grant told me last month. “HBCU football has a 124-year history, and in 124 years we had never done this.”

There was a lot of uncertainty when the SWAC and MEAC initially agreed to send their champions to Atlanta in 2015. They would be ineligible to play in the FCS playoffs if selected, and while it had been a while since an HBCU team had won a game in said playoffs, forfeiting a chance altogether made some feel uneasy.

Timing is everything. In front of 35,528, NC A&T and Alcorn State put on one of the best games of the 2015-16 bowl season. Both teams returned punts for touchdowns in the opening five minutes, then A&T star Tarik Cohen raced for touchdowns of 74 and 83 yards. The Aggies took a 24-6 lead early in the second quarter, but the Braves tied the game at 27-27 early in the fourth thanks to two touchdown passes (the second on a fake field goal) and a touchdown catch from quarterback Lenorr Footman.

The game was tied at 34-34 with under five minutes left when Cohen struck again. His 73-yard touchdown run gave the Aggies a 41-34 lead that held up. Cohen took obvious MVP honors after gaining 295 yards on 22 carries.

No bowl is a classic every year, but it’s always nice when your first go-round is memorable. If A&T had won in a blowout, the game would have still been considered a success because of attendance, conference buy-in, payout (both teams made $1 million), etc.

But the game itself certainly didn’t hurt. And the after-effects were exactly what everyone had hoped for.

“We did a lot of things right,” Grant said. “NC A&T received a 90 percent increase in their applications for the fall semester, and Alcorn State went up about 82 percent. Both schools experienced record enrollment in their freshman classes.”

A&T had star power in Cohen in 2015, but in the overall FCS landscape, the Aggies were still only decent. They finished the season 36th among FCS teams and 147th overall in the Sagarin rankings; Alcorn State was 47th and 171st, respectively.

Grambling is better than that. The Tigers head into the game ranked 129th in Sagarin, 23rd among FCS teams. Their only loss in 2016 came by only a 31-21 margin at an Arizona team that would take eventual CFP semifinalist Washington to overtime just two weeks later. They beat nine SWAC opponents by an average score of 47-15.

In the Bayou Classic against a Southern team that ranks one spot ahead of NC Central in Sagarin, Broderick Fobbs’ G-Men held only a 17-13 lead at halftime before erupting in the second half and cruising to a 52-30 win. They took their eye off the ball for a bit in the SWAC title game, trailing Alcorn State, 17-0, at halftime. But once again, the second half was all Grambling. A 31-yard Martez Carter run gave the Tigers a 27-20 win and a Celebration bid.

Grambling ranks fifth in FCS in total offense and 21st in total defense. They are fifth in team pass efficiency and third in pass efficiency defense. Quarterback Devante Kincade, an Ole Miss transfer, has thrown for 2,845 yards with a 172.8 pass efficiency rating. Basically the team’s only weakness is place-kicking.

How incredible has Fobbs’ rebuild been? He actually has a chance to do something famed Eddie Robinson never did on Saturday. GSU went 2-21 in 2012-13 but improved to 7-5 in 2014 and 9-3 in 2015, and a win on Saturday would be the Tigers 12th of 2016. Robinson won 11 games in a season twice and won at least 10 on eight other occasions. He even won bowl games. But he never won 12 games in a year.

As impressive as Grambling’s redemption story has been, NCCU’s is strong in its own right.

NCCU had fallen stagnant when Jerry Mack took over in 2014. The Eagles had enjoyed just one winning season between 2008-13 and had averaged only four wins per year in that span, but the former Memphis and South Alabama assistant led them to a 7-5 record in 2014, 8-3 in 2015. In both seasons, they won shares of the MEAC title, and only a Sagarin-related tie-breaker kept them out of the Celebration Bowl a year ago.

What’s a natural progression after winning seven and eight games? Winning nine, of course. The Eagles are 9-2; they began the season with losses in payout games against Duke and WMU, but they rolled through the MEAC schedule, playing their best in the biggest games.

Bethune-Cookman had been a thorn in Mack’s side, but NCCU romped in Daytona Beach, 31-14, in early October. The Eagles finished the season beating rival A&T, 42-21, in perhaps the biggest game in rivalry history.

From almost the opening kickoff, Central is the team playing loose, confident football. A&T seems uptight, bearing the weight of back-to-back losses in the series. NCCU drives to the Aggie 4 on its opening possession, but quarterback Malcolm Bell throws an interception; it only delays the inevitable. Dorrel McClain opens the scoring with a 15-yard burst off right guard, then Bell rushes 41 yards to make the score 14-0 at half.

Early in the second half, Khalil Stinson, one of NCCU’s self-professed Quick 6 Boys, makes a leaping, one-handed touchdown catch in the right corner of the end zone, and the rout is on. The Eagles go up 35-7 early in the fourth quarter and cruise, 42-21.

Cohen is repeatedly bottled up. The senior, who rushed for 295 yards in the inaugural Celebration Bowl and combined 133 rushing yards with 125 receiving yards in an upset of Kent State in September, gains just 88 yards in 25 touches.

Central is a team with few outright strengths and weaknesses. In the FCS statistical rankings, the Eagles are near the top in only a couple (fourth in punt returns, 11th in red zone offense, 22nd in pass efficiency) but rank near the bottom in only penalties and kick returns. They have won shootouts (34-31 over Norfolk State) and slogs (17-13 over FAMU). They feature an experienced two-deep and a three-year starter in quarterback Malcolm Bell.

Grambling has been the superior team statistically and is a nearly two-touchdown favorite, but if the Tigers start slowly, as they did in each of the last two games, the Eagles might not let them back in the game.

The SWAC and MEAC have long been in an awkward spot in the FCS landscape. They still produce star players, but the overall quality of the leagues are like that of the MAC or Sun Belt to the FCS.

The MEAC champion had not fared well in the playoffs for quite a while — Morgan State lost to Richmond by 22 in the first round in 2014, Bethune-Cookman lost to Coastal Carolina by 24 in 2013 and by 10 in 2012, Norfolk State lost by 17 to Old Dominion in 2011, etc. The SWAC had long ago begun holding its conference title game on the opening weekend of the playoffs, forfeiting the right to send anyone at all.

For money and sponsorship purposes, “Classic” games — the Bayou Classic between Southern and Grambling, the Florida Classic between FAMU and Bethune-Cookman, the Labor Day Classic between PVAMU and Texas Southern, the Magic City Classic between Alabama State and Alabama A&M, etc. — have taken precedent over national goals. And money was an obvious reason for buy-in when the Celebration Bowl came about. But there is hope that the Celebration Bowl can become more than a simple check to deposit.

“We have had our ‘classic’ games, we have had what I’ll call pseudo-bowl games” — the Heritage Bowl, for instance — “and we have had the opportunity to go to the FCS playoffs,” Grant told me. “But we’ve never had a true championship-type bowl game on a national network that has the kind of financial benefit that this one had.

“There was apprehension at first, but what we experienced last year across the board ... I came on Sept. 1, and we had 109 days to do this. Going around and visiting schools and alumni, talking about the game, it was kind of a wait-and-see situation, even in talking to sponsors and companies about supporting the game. But without question, once the event took place, people got a chance to see, ‘Wow, we have something here.’”

Grant continued. “This year it’s been different. Every coach, every athletic director, the talk was about ‘punching their ticket to Atlanta.’”

Football is just football; it shouldn’t be considered more important than academic success, the quality of the graduates you are producing, etc. Obviously. But as has been so often said, sports can be a window into the university. The Flutie Effect is real.

“Alabama has won four FBS championships since 2009,” Grant said. “Non-resident students, who pay 2.5 times the tuition [as in-state students], have more than doubled from 27 percent to 63 percent of incoming students. Kansas State, their enrollment doubled from 12,000 to 23,000 since the 1990s. TCU went to the Big 12 in 2012 and has become a contender, and out-of-state enrollment has increased by 20 percent in six years.

“The economics that go along with the participation and exposure has real, tangible impact and economic impact for the universities that participate. We want to utilize this platform to drive an increase in applications and enrollment at these [HBCU] institutions.

“They’re playing for something. There’s a different meaning. It’s exciting. There’s tremendous value for them, we think, and it allows us to provide a platform that’s essential to creating exposure. And that’s increased the desire to create better programs.”

At first, it was easy to see the Celebration Bowl as a hindrance to ambition; sure, it was a “national title game” of sorts, but what if the MEAC or SWAC were to produce a legitimate top-five-caliber FCS team, and it didn’t get a chance to prove itself in the playoffs? What’s even the point of being in FCS in that instance?

Instead, you can now see that that kind of problem is the ambition. Increased exposure, increased opportunity, and a showcase game in Atlanta could better fill school coffers, force teams to make more ambitious coaching hires (and create better opportunity for quality coaches), and create a better SWAC or MEAC. Maybe that creates “really good teams passing on playoff bids” awkwardness down the line. But that would be a hell of a problem to have.