AutoZone Liberty Bowl

The AutoZone Liberty Bowl is a college football bowl game held each year in Memphis, Tenn. It currently hosts the No. 1 pick from Conference USA against the eighth selection from the Southeastern Conference. Formerly held in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, N.J., the bowl has been in operation since 1959.

Cincinnati defeated Vanderbilt in the 2011 AutoZone Liberty Bowl, 31-24.

The Liberty Bowl was created by Bud Dudley, a former Villanova athletic director. He wanted to see Philadelphia host a bowl game, and the first game was played at Municipal Stadium in 1959. At that time, it was the only cold-weather bowl played, and attendance was always low. Its inaugural game was fairly successful, with 38,000 attendants, but the numbers dropped considerably from there. The 1963 game drew less than 10,000 fans and saw a financial loss of more than $40,000.

In 1964, Dudley was convinced to move the bowl to Atlantic City, N.J., earning $25,000 (plus a portion of bowl profits) in the process. The game was to be played in the city's Convention Hall, becoming the first bowl game held indoors. Because AstroTurf was not yet usable, the organizers had to come up with a creative way to cover the hall's cement floor. They laid a two-inch thick burlap pad over it, with four inches of grass on top of that. Artificial lighting was installed in the hall to keep the grass growing, in a process that cost more than $16,000.

In that first (and only) game in Atlantic City, 6,059 fans attended as Utah routed West Virginia. After that, Dudley decided to move the bowl once again, this time to Memphis in 1965. The bowl moved to Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, a larger facility that drew significantly larger crowds. Its success grew exponentially, and it earned a reputation as a top non-BCS bowl.

In the 1980s, the bowl became known as a landing ground for the military academies, as they offered a spot to the winner of the Commander-in-Chief's Trophy as long as that team was bowl eligible. In 1996, the automatic invitation went to the C-USA regular season champion, and since 2005, it has been the winner of the C-USA championship game.

The C-USA opponents changed throughout the 1990s and 2000s, including tie-ins with the Big East, the Western Athletic, or the Mountain West conferences. Since 2006, the C-USA title game winner matches up against the eighth selection from the SEC. Starting in 2010, the Liberty Bowl can select a Big East team if the SEC does not have enough bowl-eligible teams.

In 2009 and 2010, the game was held on Jan. 2, the only two years in its history that it was not held in December. For the 2010-11 bowl season, the game returned to a December date. AutoZone signed on as the game's title sponsor in 2004, replacing AXA Financial, which had sponsored the bowl since 1997.

Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium is a football stadium in Memphis, Tenn. The field is located at the Mid-South Fairgrounds and is the home of the annual Liberty Bowl as well as the University of Memphis football team.

The stadium was built in 1965 as the Memphis Memorial Stadium - dedicated to Memphis citizens who served in the world wars and the Korean War. It was built in large part to bring the Liberty Bowl to Memphis, after the game had been moving around several Northern cities in recent years. The first games were so successful that the stadium was renamed in honor of the bowl in 1976.