The Alabama-Mississippi All-Star Football Classic is coming back to Mobile after more than a decade away, with the Alabama High School Athletic Association confirming the senior showcase will be played at the University of South Alabama’s Hancock Whitney Stadium starting this December. The announcement closes a chapter that began in 2011, when the game left the Port City for Montgomery, and reopens one of the region’s longest-running high school traditions on a field it has never played on before.
AHSAA Executive Director Alvin Briggs announced the move, which brings the 36th edition of the series back to the city where it began nearly four decades ago. The Classic was a Mobile staple for more than two decades, played at Ladd-Peebles Stadium from 1988 through 2010 before shifting to Montgomery’s Cramton Bowl in 2011.
Under the new arrangement, the game will be hosted at Hancock Whitney Stadium in 2022, 2024 and 2026, with the first of those contests set for Saturday, December 10 at noon. The 2024 game is scheduled for Saturday, December 14, and the 2026 matchup will follow on Saturday, December 12.
“We think taking the Alabama-Mississippi Classic All-Star Game back to Mobile is a huge opportunity,” Briggs said. “The Alabama-Mississippi Classic got its start at Mobile in 1988. Mobile’s civic leaders and high school coaching community have been instrumental to the success of this great game from that beginning and helped make it what we think is the finest high school all-star football game in the nation.”
Briggs also thanked the University of South Alabama, the Mobile Sports Authority, and city and county leaders for helping bring the event home, while acknowledging Montgomery and Cramton Bowl for hosting the game since 2011. The move reflects a broader pattern in Alabama high school athletics, as the association has consolidated its marquee events into venues with modern amenities, on-campus hospitality and room to grow — a standard the aging Ladd-Peebles Stadium struggled to meet in its later years.
He credited University of South Alabama Director of Athletics Dr. Joel Erdmann and Danny Corte of the Mobile Sports Authority with playing major roles in returning both of the AHSAA’s marquee all-star games to the city.
Erdmann said the stadium’s return to hosting the Classic gives the university a chance to make a lasting impression on some of the region’s top student-athletes and their families. “We are extremely excited to host the historic Alabama-Mississippi High School All-Star Game at Hancock Whitney Stadium on the campus of the University of South Alabama,” Erdmann said. “This is a great opportunity to showcase our campus and community to these players, families and friends. We appreciate the efforts of Danny Corte and the Mobile Sports Authority for their leadership in making this a reality.”
That recruiting angle is not incidental. Every player in the Classic is a college prospect or a soon-to-be one, and filling the stands with 40 of the two states’ best seniors and their families is, from the university’s side, the most efficient campus visit it could buy. South Alabama’s football program — which plays its home games in the same stadium — has recruited heavily from Mobile and Baldwin counties since the program’s founding, and a December showcase on campus puts the program’s facilities in front of exactly the players it wants.
Two December showcases in one city
Hancock Whitney Stadium has increasingly become a hub for the state’s top prep talent. The venue already hosts the AHSAA North-South All-Star Football Classic, which moved from the summer to winter and shifted from Montgomery’s Cramton Bowl to Mobile in 2020. That game will continue to be played in the city alongside the returning Alabama-Mississippi Classic, giving Mobile two marquee senior all-star showcases each December.
The pairing turns the first weeks of December into a high school football festival for the Gulf Coast, with the North-South game drawing the state’s top seniors from within Alabama and the Classic adding Mississippi’s best to the same stadium a few days later. For local fans, it means two chances in one month to see the state’s elite underclassmen — many of them bound for Southeastern Conference and other Division I rosters — on a single field.
The Alabama-Mississippi Classic is organized annually by the AHSAA and the Alabama High School Athletic Directors and Coaches Association in partnership with the Mississippi Association of Coaches. Since 2015 the game has rotated between the two states, alternating with games hosted in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a pattern that will continue even as Mobile locks in its share of the rotation.
The series on the field
On the field, the series has long been competitive. Alabama holds a 24-11 all-time edge in the Classic, which features 40 of the top senior football players from Alabama and Mississippi each year. Alabama’s all-stars won 17 of the 24 previous meetings played in Mobile, including the first three matchups in a row, all decided in overtime — a start to the series that set its tone of razor-thin margins.
Last December, Alabama shut out Mississippi 20-0 at the University of Southern Mississippi’s M.M. Roberts Stadium in Hattiesburg, marking Alabama’s first win on Mississippi soil and just its second shutout in series history. Mississippi’s only shutout of Alabama in the rivalry came in 1998, a 9-0 result at Ladd-Peebles Stadium.
Danny Corte of the Mobile Sports Authority said hosting high-profile AHSAA and coaching association events has long been a priority for the city. “We at the Mobile Sports Authority are excited the Alabama-Mississippi High School All-Star Football Game will be coming home this December and beyond,” Corte said. “With the roots of this game going back to 1988 in Mobile, we’re fired up the game is returning to our area.”
Corte also credited the University of South Alabama, the Mobile County Marketing Committee and Visit Mobile for coming together to make the agreement possible, saying the partnership will help create a strong experience for the visiting student-athletes and their families.
Mississippi is scheduled to host the 2023 edition of the Classic before the series returns to Mobile in 2024. Historically, Mississippi holds a 3-1 record in games played at Hattiesburg, while Alabama went 6-1 during the years the Classic was staged at Cramton Bowl in Montgomery.
For Mobile, the return of the Alabama-Mississippi Classic adds another significant sporting event to a growing calendar of high school and college athletics hosted at Hancock Whitney Stadium, reinforcing the city’s standing as a hub for prep football in the Gulf Coast region. Between the Jaguars’ home schedule, the North-South Classic, the state playoff rounds the venue has hosted, and now the Alabama-Mississippi game, the stadium’s December calendar alone would have been unthinkable when the Classic last left town — a measure of how far Mobile’s sports infrastructure has come since 2010.
The Classic’s history explains why its return matters locally. When the game debuted at Ladd-Peebles in 1988, it filled a niche no other event occupied: a single December afternoon when the two states’ best seniors, most of them already committed to college programs, played on the same field while college coaches and NFL scouts watched from the stands. Ladd-Peebles, the aging but beloved stadium near the airport in west Mobile, gave the game a sense of occasion, and generations of Mobile-area players — from Murphy, McGill-Toolen, Vigor, Williamson and the Baldwin County schools — made the roster over the years.
The Montgomery years kept the game alive but changed its relationship to its home crowd. At the Cramton Bowl, the Classic became part of Montgomery’s winter event calendar, well-run but more distant from the Mobile Bay coaching community that Briggs credited with building the series. Fans and families from the Gulf Coast had to travel three hours to watch their own players, and the game’s local identity faded even as its competitive record held steady.
The economics of hosting also changed over that span. All-star games of this kind depend on a partnership — a venue willing to donate the building, a visitors bureau willing to fund hotel blocks and marketing, and a university willing to tie its brand to the event. Hancock Whitney Stadium, opened in 2020 as the centerpiece of South Alabama’s campus athletics district, gave Mobile exactly that package: a modern 10,000-plus-seat facility adjacent to campus, with the Mobile Sports Authority acting as the coordinating body that had helped land the North-South game two years earlier.
For the players, the Classic carries a significance beyond the scoreboard. Rosters are assembled by the coaching associations from nominations across both states, and selection is itself an honor that follows a senior into college — a line on a bio that says he was one of his state’s best twenty that year. Practices in the days before the game bring together players who will spend the next four years competing against each other in the SEC, Conference USA and the Sun Belt, and many form friendships that outlast the week.
The game’s format also showcases position depth in a way regular season games cannot. With no incumbent starters to protect, both coaching staffs spread the ball across forty players, giving every selection meaningful snaps — including specialists and linemen who rarely appear in highlight reels but whom college staffs evaluate closely in a setting like this.
Mobile’s claim as the series’ home base is more than sentimental. The city produced many of the Classic’s most memorable alumni across its first two decades, and the coaching community Briggs praised — the athletic directors and head coaches who nominate, select and staff the Alabama roster — remains centered on the Gulf Coast. Bringing the game back puts the selection machinery in the same city as the talent pipeline that feeds it.