The LendingTree Bowl is leaving Mobile’s Ladd-Peebles Stadium. Bowl organizers announced Friday that the game will move to Hancock Whitney Stadium, the new on-campus home of the University of South Alabama — a shift that leaves the 73-year-old west Mobile venue with almost no anchor tenants remaining.
The move had been widely expected since Hancock Whitney Stadium opened on the South Alabama campus. The Jaguars moved their own home games there, and the Senior Bowl quickly followed, trading Ladd-Peebles for the modern facility. With the bowl game now gone as well, the high school programs that helped fill Ladd’s fall calendar are building stadiums of their own, thinning the venue’s future schedule further.
A stadium searching for a purpose
The departure lands just a year after Ladd’s board secured roughly $1 million in funding for locker room renovations — work that was completed but now faces an uncertain audience. Outside of football, the stadium’s recent entertainment record has been modest: the most notable booking was a three-night run of socially distanced outdoor shows by bluegrass artist Billy Strings, staged in the parking lot rather than the stadium bowl itself.
Safety questions have also shadowed the venue. A shooting at a high school game this fall — the third gun incident at Ladd in five years, according to reporting at the time — drew criticism after spectators described metal detectors being shut down in the second half of the Williamson-Vigor game, allowing fans to leave and re-enter. Ladd officials and Mobile County Public School System leaders have traded blame over the security lapse.
Ladd Board Chairwoman Ann Davis said it was too early to say what comes next for the stadium when asked recently, while pointing to next fall’s Gulf Coast Classic as one event still on the horizon. Mayor Sandy Stimpson has long argued the city has no real future in propping up the aging stadium, and the bowl’s exit strengthens the case of those who say Mobile should redirect its support toward newer facilities.
For now, the LendingTree Bowl’s relocation all but completes the exodus from a venue that once hosted Elvis and packed college bowl crowds, leaving Ladd-Peebles to chart an uncertain path with few games left to call its own.