The 2015 Birmingham Bowl was a college football

bowl game In North America, a bowl game is one of a number of post-season college football games that are primarily played by teams belonging to the NCAA's Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). For most of its history, the Division I Bowl Subdivi ...

played on January 3, 2015 at

Legion Field Legion Field is an outdoor stadium in the southeastern United States in Birmingham, Alabama, primarily designed to be used as a venue for American football, but occasionally used for other large outdoor events. Opened in 1927, it is named in ho ...

Birmingham, Alabama Birmingham ( ) is a city in the north central region of the U.S. state of Alabama. Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. As of the 2021 census estimates, Birmingham had a population of 197,575, down 1% fr ...

in the United States. The ninth annual

Birmingham Bowl The Birmingham Bowl is a post-season NCAA-sanctioned Division I FBS college football bowl game played annually in Birmingham, Alabama. First held in 2006, the game is owned and operated by ESPN Events. The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UA ...

saw the Florida Gators of the

Southeastern Conference The Southeastern Conference (SEC) is an American college athletic conference whose member institutions are located primarily in the South Central and Southeastern United States. Its fourteen members include the flagship public universities o ...

defeat the East Carolina Pirates of the

American Athletic Conference The American Athletic Conference (The American or AAC) is an American collegiate athletic conference, featuring 11 member universities and five affiliate member universities that compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) ...

by a score of 28–20.Birmingham Bowl pits Florida against East Carolina
/ref> The game started at 11:00 a.m. CST and aired on

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). Th ...

. It was one of the 2014–15 bowl games that concluded the 2014 FBS football season.

Teams

This was the second overall meeting between these two teams. The last time these two teams met was in 1983, a game Florida won by a score of 24–17. The teams would meet again on September 12, 2015 at Florida's Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, a game Florida won 31-24.

East Carolina Pirates

After finishing their regular season with an 8–4 record, the Pirates accepted their invitation to play in the game. This was East Carolina's second Birmingham Bowl.

They In Modern English, ''they'' is a third-person pronoun relating to a grammatical subject. Morphology In Standard Modern English, ''they'' has five distinct word forms: * ''they'': the nominative (subjective) form * ''them'': the accusat ...

previously played in the

2006 PapaJohns.com Bowl The 2006 PapaJohns.com Bowl was the inaugural postseason college football match of the game, between the South Florida Bulls and the East Carolina Pirates at Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama. The University of South Florida represented the Big ...

(the inaugural version of that game), losing to the

South Florida Bulls The South Florida Bulls (also known as the USF Bulls) are the athletic teams that represent the University of South Florida. USF competes in NCAA Division I and is a member of the American Athletic Conference for all sports besides sailing, ...

by a score of 24–7.

Florida Gators

After finishing their regular season with a 6–5 record, the Gators accepted their invitation to play in the game. Florida was led by interim head coach D. J. Durkin. Durkin was the Gators defensive coordinator until former head coach

Will Muschamp William Lawrence Muschamp (born August 3, 1971) is an American football coach and former player. He is the co-defensive coordinator and safeties coach at the University of Georgia. He served as head football coach at the University of Florida fr ...

was released at the conclusion of the 2014 regular season. Muschamp's replacement is former Colorado State head coach

Jim McElwain James Frank McElwain (born March 1, 1962) is an American football coach who is currently the head coach at Central Michigan University. He previously served as the head coach at Florida from 2015 to 2017, and Colorado State from 2012 to 2014, wh ...

. This was Florida's first Birmingham Bowl.

Game summary

Scoring summary

Source:

Statistics

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:2015 Birmingham Bowl (01)

Birmingham Bowl East Carolina Pirates football bowl games Florida Gators football bowl games January 2015 sports events in the United States