Oyster Bowl
The Oyster Bowl is an annual regular season college football game played in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. The game has featured match-ups between high schools, NCAA Division III teams, and NCAA Division I teams. The current rendition of the game serves as an in-conference matchup for the Old Dominion Monarchs. It is sponsored by the Chesapeake, Virginia-based Khedive Temple of the Shriners, which includes a portion of the revenue going to children's charity.
As a major college neutral-site contest in Norfolk, Virginia from 1948 to 1995, the Oyster Bowl served as the region's counterpart to the Tobacco Bowl in Richmond, Virginia, and the short-lived Harvest Bowl in Roanoke, Virginia, which were also regular season neutral-site games.
History
During the first incarnation of the Oyster Bowl, the game was held at Foreman Field in Norfolk, Virginia. The inaugural contest, held in 1946, featured two high school teams, the local Granby Comets and the Clifton Mustangs of Clifton, New Jersey. After a one-year break, the game was resumed in 1948 as a major college football contest, and was played continuously until 1995, when it was discontinued for financial reasons. The series of games from 1946 to 1995 generated more than $3 million for the Shriners Hospitals for Children.Many well known players participated in the Oyster Bowl during the time it featured Division I teams. These include Ernie Davis of Syracuse, Bruce Smith of Virginia Tech, Roger Staubach of Navy, Fran Tarkenton of Georgia, and Randy White of Maryland. The 1977 game between East Carolina and William & Mary featured an incident well-publicized at the time, in which former East Carolina head coach Jim Johnson, attending the game as a sideline spectator, tackled a William & Mary player about to score the game-winning touchdown.
In 1999, after a hiatus of three years, the Oyster Bowl was revived and relocated to Joseph S. Darling Memorial Stadium in nearby Hampton, Virginia, as a match-up between Division III college teams. Three of the six games in Hampton featured the Apprentice School from nearby Newport News, Virginia. In 2005 the Oyster Bowl moved to Newport News as an annual home game for the Apprentice School.
In 2011, the Oyster Bowl returned to a renovated Foreman Field as an annual home game for Division I Old Dominion University. Recent visiting teams have been conference rivals of ODU from Conference USA and the Sun Belt Conference.