The ReliaQuest Bowl — Tampa, Florida

The ReliaQuest Bowl is the college football bowl game that the Tampa Bay Bowl Association stages each winter at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. According to the bowl's about page, the game matches teams from the SEC and the Big Ten Conference and caps a week-long schedule of events around Tampa Bay. The 2026 edition is listed for December 31, 2026, with a noon ET kickoff, and the bowl gives a typical payout of $6.4 million.

The organization behind the game is a local nonprofit. The Tampa Bay Bowl Association is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) corporation governed by an approximately twenty-member volunteer board of directors, which oversees a full-time staff of seven employees, including the President/CEO. The association files annual IRS 990 reports and commissions an independent audit each year, and its office is on West Boy Scout Boulevard in Tampa. Its stated mission is to create an economic impact in the Tampa Bay area, showcase the community nationally and internationally, and make a significant financial contribution to NCAA member schools.

The bowl dates to a single decision in the spring of 1986. The bowl's key moments timeline records that on April 16, 1986, the NCAA awarded a college bowl game to Tampa Bay. The first Hall of Fame Bowl followed on December 23, 1986, at Tampa Stadium, where Boston College beat Georgia 27-24, according to the year-by-year game history. An NBC television contract came in August 1987, and the January 2, 1988 game matched Michigan and Alabama, with the Wolverines winning 28-24 in the final seconds.

The Tampa game moved into the New Year's Day lineup with the 1989 game, which brought two top-20 teams to Tampa Stadium for the first time, No. 16 Syracuse and No. 19 LSU. A year later, No. 9 Auburn and No. 21 Ohio State drew a record crowd of 68,085, a mark the bowl still lists as its attendance record. The bowl signed its first ESPN contract on April 24, 1992, and in October 1994 it signed a six-year deal with the SEC and Big Ten, the conference pairing it still uses.

Each name reflects a title sponsor. The bowl's about page states that the game was the Hall of Fame Bowl from December 1986 to January 1995 and the Outback Bowl from April 1995 to March 2022. On April 12, 1995, the bowl signed Outback Steakhouse as title sponsor and adopted the Outback Bowl name, which lasted through the January 2022 game in Tampa.

The current name arrived in two steps in 2022. In March 2022 the association announced a new name, the Tampa Bay Bowl, along with a new logo. On June 9, 2022, the bowl signed ReliaQuest as its new title sponsor in a four-year partnership, and the game became the ReliaQuest Bowl. By the bowl's count, the game spent nine years as the Hall of Fame Bowl before the first rename, while the Tampa Bay Bowl Association has stayed the organizer under every name.

For its first twelve games, the bowl used Tampa Stadium. The key moments timeline records that on January 1, 1999, the bowl moved to the brand new Raymond James Stadium and sold out its first game there, Penn State against Kentucky. The bowl's stadium page lists Raymond James Stadium as opening on September 20, 1998, at a cost of $168 million, designed by HOK Sports Facilities Group, with a capacity of 65,890 that can expand to 75,000 for certain events and 10,000 parking spaces.

The building belongs to a public agency. The bowl names the Tampa Sports Authority as the stadium's owner and operator, and the Tampa Sports Authority reports that Raymond James Stadium first broke ground in 1996 and hosted its first game on September 20, 1998, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers played the Chicago Bears. The authority lists the bowl, under its Outback Bowl name, among the stadium's regular events alongside the Buccaneers, University of South Florida football and the Gasparilla Bowl.

Overtime has shaped the bowl's reputation in Tampa. On January 1, 2000, Georgia beat Purdue 28-25 in overtime in what the bowl calls the first sporting event of the new millennium; it was only the second overtime bowl game in history and featured a 25-point Georgia comeback. On January 1, 2010, Auburn beat Northwestern 38-35 in overtime, and the bowl reports that the teams tied or set 39 bowl records and 9 NCAA records. On January 2, 2012, Michigan State came back from a 0-16 halftime deficit to beat Georgia 33-30 in triple overtime, only the third bowl game in NCAA history to go that far.

Other entries on the Tampa timeline mark rankings and firsts. The highest ranked team to appear was No. 7, a spot held by Georgia in 2005 and Indiana in 2020, according to the bowl by the numbers page. Arkansas made its first bowl trip to Tampa in January 2022 and beat Penn State. The January 2021 game was played during the COVID 19 pandemic before a limited crowd. In December 2025 the bowl celebrated its 40th anniversary game, a 34-27 Iowa win over Vanderbilt played on December 31, 2025, the second straight edition held on New Year's Eve rather than New Year's Day.

The bowl measures its footprint in the hundreds of millions. Its numbers page reports $190 million in total contributions to universities over 40 years, an estimated $1.3 billion in economic impact on the Tampa Bay area over its history (excluding exposure), and total attendance of 2,131,452 across 40 years. It also counts 27 different schools that have played in Tampa, 122 first-round NFL draft picks who have appeared in the game and roughly 110,500 musicians and dancers who have performed in halftime shows.

Charity giving is a newer line item. The Charitable Giving Initiative began in 2016 to fund non-profit organizations based in, or with a large presence in, the Tampa Bay area. In May 2026 the initiative passed $5 million donated to over 240 area non-profits since 2016, according to the key moments timeline, and the bowl has committed at least $500,000 more each year. Recipients listed by the bowl include Feeding Tampa Bay, Metropolitan Ministries, the Florida Aquarium and the Straz Center for the Performing Arts. The Tampa Bay Business Journal has named the bowl a One Tampa Bay Honoree for Corporate Philanthropy three times.