How Missouri football and Virginia were paired in the Gator Bowl — with a twist

Mizzou and No. 19 Virginia will meet in the Gator Bowl at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 27, at EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida.

The process of selecting those teams was far from easy. Greg McGarity, president and CEO of the Gator Bowl, told the Missourian how Mizzou and Virginia were selected to play in Jacksonville.

Conferences and bowl committees work together to create the bowl matchups, although teams usually have at least some input on their postseason destination.

“We tell them who we’d like to have,” McGarity said, “but it’s really up to the schools to determine where they prefer to go.”

The better a team’s conference record, the more influence it has in determining which bowl game it attends. That affected a couple of SEC teams last season.

“Last year, we would have loved to have Florida with seven wins because they’re 70 miles down the road,” McGarity said. “But Ole Miss, with nine wins, preferred to come to the Gator Bowl, so they bumped Florida.”

Things were fairly straightforward on the SEC side this season. No. 13-ranked Texas, which went 6-2 in the SEC, accepted a bid to the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, which gets first pick of SEC teams that don’t make the 12-team College Football Playoff. Vanderbilt, which ranks No. 12 and also finished 6-2 in SEC play, accepted a bid to the ReliaQuest Bowl in Tampa, Florida. The Commodores lost a head-to-head tiebreaker with the Longhorns, so Clark Lea’s team was behind Texas in bowl selection priority.

The three schools left to choose from were Mizzou, Tennessee and LSU. Missouri’s Tigers and the Volunteers each finished 4-4 in the SEC, while the Baton Rouge Tigers finished 3-5, meaning that Mizzou and Tennessee got priority regarding their bowl destinations.

Since MU played in the Music City Bowl last season, it made more sense for Tennessee to go to Nashville, McGarity said. Teams have played in the same bowl in consecutive seasons before, and no rule says it can’t happen. That’s exactly the case with LSU this season, as it will compete in the Texas Bowl for the second straight year.

But that was because LSU was the last bowl-eligible team left in the SEC, meaning the Tigers had no say in where they ended up. Their destination would be decided by where each of the four teams above them went. Once the dust settled, the Texas Bowl wanted LSU, and it got LSU.

The potential for Mizzou to return to Music City was much more avoidable, McGarity said. Plus, Tennessee was an attractive option for the Music City Bowl committee: Knoxville, Tennesee, is only a three-hour car ride from Nashville, and three of the bowl game’s four highest-attended matchups featured the Volunteers. At that point, the Gator Bowl made the most sense for Mizzou.

Picking Virginia, however, was a much more arduous endeavor.

ACC protocol states that a team with at least 10 wins must play in the Gator Bowl, the Pop-Tarts Bowl in Orlando or the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. Thus, 10-3 Virginia was automatically in consideration for those three bowls. Since there were no other 10-win ACC teams, No. 22 Georgia Tech (9-3) was in consideration as the next-best ACC team.

Also in the pool was No. 11 Notre Dame, which threw a giant wrench into the bowl selection process Sunday after it was left out of the College Football Playoff.

On3’s Brett McMurphy reported that Notre Dame officials spent almost an hour on Sunday deciding if they should accept an invitation to the Pop-Tarts Bowl against No. 12 BYU in Orlando before ultimately declining all bowl assignments.

Notre Dame’s call affected every bowl that had a tie-in with the ACC, including the Gator Bowl. McGarity said that the Gator Bowl committee was “way down the road” with extending a bid to Georgia Tech, not only because of its 9-3 record but because its campus in Atlanta is only a five-hour car ride to Jacksonville.

Instead, the Irish were replaced by the Yellow Jackets in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, which had the first pick in the aforementioned pool of ACC teams plus Notre Dame.

That put the Gator Bowl in a bit of a bind. Because of the protocol, Virginia was the only viable option since the Cavaliers finished 10-3 and the next-best teams in the ACC all had eight or fewer wins. The announcement of UVA’s participation came more than two hours after MU’s announced participation. That delay was due to Notre Dame’s lengthy consideration of whether to participate in a non-CFP bowl game.

“To have to pivot certainly was disappointing,” McGarity said. “From a proximity factor, it’s a long haul for Virginia to drive, and Atlanta would have been much more desirable for us.

Virginia’s campus in Charlottesville is almost 10 hours away from Jacksonville by car.

Nevertheless, McGarity is eager to host the Tigers and Cavaliers, both of whom can make school history with wins. Mizzou can win at least nine games in three consecutive seasons for the first time in program history. Virginia can win 11 games in a season for the first time in program history.

“They both want to be here,” McGarity said. “They’re both very excited.”

This story was originally published December 9, 2025 at 12:37 PM.