🏈 Virginia at Louisville, Saturday, 4 October 2025, 1530, ESPN2

[ElliottHoo]

Eh, I’m fine with the mayo-dump and whatnot, its part of what makes bowl season fun. I just want the PR stunt to be affiliated with a good enough bowl. And its about a month before I start getting serious about looking up bowl-payouts but off the top of my head the Duke’s Mayo bowl feels a little underwhelming.

Don’t get me wrong, its a good bowl. In most seasons I’d be pretty happy for UVA to end up there. But, unless the structure has changed, its the top of the “good” bowls rather than the bottom of the “great” bowls. It was the Belk bowl back when we pummeled UsC back in 2018, and while I haven’t looked up how the bowl assignments all worked out that time, I feel like this squad (as it stands now) deserves something better.

[ElliottHoo]

Ok, I did 10 minutes of poking around and couldn’t find anything for this year and I didn’t go through the numbers last year, but if things haven’t changed since the year before that, then Duke’s Mayo would be a little underwhelming.

How “good” a bowl is basically comes down to its payout. The more a bowl pays, the earlier they get to choose which teams they get. In theory the ACC’s bowls don’t have a pecking order, but in reality they 100% have different tiers. The bowls obviously pick teams based on how well they think they’ll draw to the game, which is largely based on how good the teams are but not 100%. Hypothetically, if the Duke’s Mayo Bowl had to pick between a BC team ranked 16th in the country vs a UNC team ranked 24th, they’d probably pick UNC, even if BC is better, to draw more fans.

So, obviously making the playoffs beats everything else. After that, the best ACC bowls are (the bowls are ranked roughly in order within each tier):

Top tier bowls

• Poptarts (used to be Camping World)
• Reliaquest (used to be Outback)
• Taxslayer Gator

2nd tier

• Duke’s Mayo
• Tony the Tiger/Sun
• Pinstripe

3rd tier

• Fenway
• Military
• First Responder/ServePro
• Birmingham

The first tier is great, second tier is good, third tier is “happy to have made a bowl game”. Fenway might be bottom of 2nd tier rather than top of 3rd, we’ll find out in a few weeks when the numbers start coming out.

Our 2018 squad was solidly, and appropriately, rewarded with the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (was the Belk bowl then), and our 2019 team had everything break exactly right to sneak into the Orange Bowl (which alternated between being a CFP bowl and not. Our year it wasn’t CFP, but it was only a half-step down, and would have been either the very top of the Top Tier bowls or arguably its own category above them).

This year, if the guys continue to play well but not well enough to make the CFP, I feel like they’ll deserve a top-tier bowl rather than a tier-2 bowl like Duke’s Mayo. Duke’s Mayo is a good bowl and would be a perfectly fine outcome (and not an insult by any means), I just feel they’d deserve a little better.

Again, this all assumes nothing has substantially changed from 2+ years ago and the team continues doing well.

[4547Lambeth]

I don’t know when you were a kid, but the Pop Tarts Bowl has been around since 1990 under various names.

I’m pretty sure I remember us playing in the Carquest and MicronPC versions and turning down the Russell Athletic version one year because of a conflict with exams.

• Blockbuster (1990–1993)

• Carquest (1994–1997)

• MicronPC (1998–2000)

• Florida Tourism (2001)

• Mazda (2002–2003)

• Champs Sports (2004–2011)

• Russell Athletic (2012–2016)

• Camping World (2017–2019)

• Kellogg’s / Kellanova (2020–present)

[haney]

@ElliottHoo

2nd tier

• Duke’s Mayo
• Tony the Tiger/Sun
• Pinstripe

3rd tier

• Fenway
• Military
• First Responder/ServePro
• Birmingham

I’d reorder these like so:

2nd:

• Mayo
• Frosted Flakes

3rd:

• AL East

4th:

• Annapolis

5th:

• Annapolis below freezing

@ElliottHoo just making them up tier:

• ServPro
• Birmingham

[buzby]

Having been to both, I prefer El Paso for quickly gassing up and tearing ass through.

San Diego is better for just about everything else, including food.

Neither’s convenient but the added hassle is worth it IMO. I’m prob equidistant and location would absolutely determine whether I’d go.

[GulfCoastHoo]

For some reason I was thinking the current Pop Tarts Bowl was the old Citrus Bowl. The same one we lost to Illinois & Jeff George after the 1989 ACC championship. But not sure it’s the same one now.

[4547Lambeth]

I don’t think I’ve ever been colder in my life than I was during that Military Bowl.

All I ask for a bowl game for us is a P4 opponent in warmer weather than Charlottesville, not in a baseball stadium and in a time slot when I can actually watch the game.

[BDragon]

Makes sense. I have no point of reference about visiting El Paso other than I want to pay my respects to the Guerrero family.

I love San Diego, it’s a pain to get to even from here in Atl. But you haven’t had a good day until you spent an afternoon walking around the San Diego zoo enjoying a cold beer and watching a lion roar.

[GulfCoastHoo]

At the risk of derailing this into a travel thread, San Diego is my favorite city in the U.S. I’d move there tomorrow but I want to retire totally in 5 years…not 15.

[4547Lambeth]

Do the Bowls even pick the teams anymore? I thought that the conferences assigned the teams to the games, with input from the Bowls on their preferences and input from the schools on their preferences as well.

[4547Lambeth]

The old Citrus Bowl is the Cheez-Its Bowl now.

[ElliottHoo]

The Citrus Bowl is still out there, its the Cheese-Its Citrus Bowl now. Its mostly Big Ten vs SEC, but every few years (when a specific combination of CFP-related things happen) it can pick an ACC team instead, so it kinda comes and goes from our radar.

[BDragon]

I think the conference slotting takes most of the selection out of it. They don’t do the traveling road show of bowl reps sipping liquor and watching games all season passing out invites to the ball.

[zh00s]

@ElliottHoo

Cheese-Its Citrus Bowl

mmm Orange juice and cheeze its

[ElliottHoo]

For the ACC, as of a couple years ago, when the conference championship games wrapped up the bowls in each tier would start informally chatting with each other and the ACC about who they wanted to take. The lower tier bowls were generally pretty collegial. The top teams are taken already, and since those bowls are fairly spread out geographically its easy enough to sort out which 7-5 teams are going to be wanted by which bowls.

But the top tier bowls are in Orlando, Tampa, and Jacksonville, so they have similar geographic interests. And more importantly, picking first should get you a nationally-recognized “good” team while picking third probably will not. The Poptarts (former Camping World) Bowl used to get the clear first pick, but I dunno if that’s still true and I could very much see the ACC stepping in here to help moderate which teams go where.

[ElliottHoo]

Hah, I had the same thought. Like… that is a genuinely unappealing combination.

[dave92]

UVA fans: ‘How do bowl games work?’

[4547Lambeth]

We don’t have all 3 of Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville, do we? I thought it was Orlando and Jacksonville, but in 2 out of 6 years we could swap Jacksonville for Tampa with the SEC. Something like that.

I think we have the Holiday Bowl too.

[ElliottHoo]

Yeah, I double checked and you’re right. Reliaquest/Outback in Tampa shouldn’t really be on our list anymore.

Reliaquest in Tampa is the one I shouldn’t have included. They re-did their contract several years ago and are mostly SEC vs Big Ten now (with caveats depending on how the CFP selections go). They’ve included ACC teams in the past, but its been a while and it’d take a wild combination of events for us to end up there.

In theory, the Gator Bowl is the SEC vs ACC (including Notre Dame) half the time and the Big Ten half the time, but in practice they’ve taken an ACC team (or ND) every year since 2016 (except 2020). I think its supposed to be 50/50, but they get something like the 2nd or 3rd pick among ACC teams but the 6th or 7th pick among Big Ten teams so it usually ends up going to the ACC..

Poptarts Bowl in Orlando is ACC vs B12 and has taken an ACC team every year since the early 90s, and that’s what I’m hoping we get. We’ll probably need to reach the ACCCG (and lose) to get in (or have whoever beats us for the slot make it to the CFP). I’d forgotten it was briefly the Cheese-Its bowl between being Camping World and Poptarts, then Cheese-Its moved onto the Citrus Bowl for whatever reason.

[NorVaHoo]

If we go to the Charlotte bowl we can all stay at @Jerome ’s house. Comes with a bottle of Buffalo Trace on every pillow.