The scoreboard at Ladd-Peebles Stadium read 24-23 when it was over, which is about as close as an annual rivalry showcase can get without going to overtime. Tuskegee University held on to beat Fort Valley State in this year’s Port City Classic, capping a weekend that turned Mobile into a destination for HBCU football fans from across the Southeast.
The final margin was one point. For most of the people in the stands, the number was almost beside the point.
A Weekend Built Around More Than a Game
The Port City Classic has grown into one of Mobile’s signature sports weekends, and the crowd it draws is not primarily a local one. Fans and alumni of both programs traveled for hours to reach Ladd-Peebles.
“They came from Americus,” said Fort Valley State fan Stan Jocy. “Took us a couple hours to get here, but we are here.”
Others came a great deal farther. Leander Adams, a Fort Valley State graduate from the class of 1975 and a season ticket holder, put his travel time at eight hours.
That willingness to drive most of a day for a regular-season football game says something specific about HBCU athletics. The classic format — two historically Black colleges and universities meeting at a neutral site in a city with a large alumni presence — has functioned for decades as an annual reunion as much as a competition.
‘TU Pride. HBCU Pride.’
Tuskegee fan Raven Lang framed the weekend in exactly those terms.
“TU PRIDE. HBCU PRIDE,” Lang said. “It’s a great community event to bring everybody together.”
Asked what the institution meant to her, Lang’s answer moved past football entirely.
“It means the world to me,” she said. “It made me who I am today. Professional, but, you know, working for my community, giving back to my community. I grew up there. It’s an awesome opportunity for anybody.”
For Adams, the connection is generational and literal.
“Well, I’m second of three generations to graduate from Fort Valley State University,” Adams said. “Second generation who played at Fort Valley State University, so my family history is Fort Valley State University.”
Three generations through one institution is the kind of continuity that turns a football schedule into a family calendar. It is also, in practical terms, what sustains an event like the Port City Classic: not casual sports interest, but multi-decade institutional loyalty passed down at home.
The Matchup
This year’s edition paired the Fort Valley State Wildcats against the Tuskegee Golden Tigers. Both are storied programs in Division II’s Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, one of the oldest athletic conferences in the country and a league composed of historically Black institutions across the Southeast.
Tuskegee, based in Macon County, Alabama, carries one of the deepest football traditions in Black college athletics. Fort Valley State, in middle Georgia, brings its own long-running program and a devoted traveling following — on display in the number of Wildcats fans who made the trip to the Gulf Coast.
Fort Valley State came in confident. “This is Fort Valley’s second game of the year, and we are going to have a victory,” Jocy said before the game. “It’s plain and it’s simple we are to have a victory.”
The Wildcats came within a single point of making him right.
Why Ladd-Peebles Keeps Getting These Games
Ladd-Peebles Stadium has hosted big football for a long time. The Mobile venue has been home to bowl games, all-star showcases and high school championship football, and its capacity and history make it one of the few facilities on the central Gulf Coast that can absorb a large visiting crowd for a single weekend.
For a classic, that capacity matters less than the surrounding geography. Mobile sits within reasonable driving distance of a broad swath of Alabama, Mississippi, the Florida Panhandle and southwest Georgia, which puts a great many HBCU alumni within a day trip. Combined with a downtown hotel and restaurant base, that makes the city a workable neutral site — and one where the economic benefit lands on local businesses across the weekend rather than only inside the stadium.
A Rivalry Renewed
The one-point finish is the kind of result that guarantees conversation until next year. It also reinforces the argument for the classic format itself: two evenly matched programs, a neutral venue, a crowd split down the middle, and a game decided by a single possession.
Tuskegee leaves Mobile with the win. Fort Valley State leaves with a near-miss that will be relitigated at tailgates for twelve months. And Mobile, once again, spent a September weekend as the center of HBCU football in the region — which, for the fans who drove eight hours to get here, was always the larger point.