Plot Synopsis

First held on New Year's Day 1946 and sponsored by the Downtown Lions' Club of Jacksonville, the inaugural Gator Bowl featured Wake Forest and South Carolina playing in front of nearly 8,000 spectators in the 22,000-capacity Jacksonville Stadium. The teams had played each other to a 13-13 tie during the regular season -- just months before meeting in the first Gator Bowl, where Wake Forest came away a 26-14 winner. Each team received a $10,000 payout. The bowl game continued without a title sponsor until 1986, when Mazda attached its name to the event. At the time, Dick Goldstein, a vice president of marketing at CBS, said "We here at CBS foresee in the next five years that it won't be called the Mazda Gator Bowl, it will just simply be called the Mazda Bowl." Goldstein's prediction didn't come true for another 30 years, when it took on the name TaxSlayer Bowl from 2014 through 2017, after running through a string of title sponsors, including: Outback, Toyota, Konica Minolta, Progressive, and TaxSlayer.com. In 2018, the event again became the Gator Bowl with a title sponsor, and has been called the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl since then.