This is a list of recent black college football classics that have taken place between historically black colleges and universities that compete in college football in the United States. Unlike bowl games, classics take place during college football's regular season; they differ from standard regular season games in that they are often accompanied by entertaining battle of the bands, parades, social events, concerts, and are often played at neutral sites. Football classics annually attract large crowds of alumni, fans, and spectators, along with high media interest and corporate sponsorships.
Special games pairing HBCUs have existed since at least 1922 when Bishop defeated Southern 19–0 in the Louisiana State Fair Classic. The earliest documented use of the term "classic" as part of an annual black college football game's formal name dates to the 1927 Louisiana State Fair Classic, although the term may have been in use even earlier than that. Though Grambling State's Eddie Robinson did not invent classic games, he is widely regarded as having perfected them as finance-generating social events, and a chapter of his autobiography details his efforts at doing so. He was particularly proud of the success of the Bayou Classic, starting from its very first game with 76,000 patrons in attendance.
Football classics come in three different kinds of formats. They can pair the same two rivals year after year or can feature a single host school with rotating opponents—most famously done during Florida A&M's association with the now-defunct Orange Blossom Classic. Other classics, particularly those based in the northern and western U.S. where there are fewer HBCUs, simply invite two different schools every season.
Classics that do double as annual rivalry games sometimes consider the first game played under a classic-format as separate from the actual first game of the series, due to the pronounced differences in ambience surrounding the games. For example, Grambling and Southern first clashed in 1932 but today rarely acknowledge their games played prior to the formal creation of the Bayou Classic of New Orleans, Louisiana in 1974; indeed, the series even seems to have intensified since it has become more of a media spectacle—Southern initially won a solid 60% of the games in the series through 1973, but after it was reconfigured as a classic the following year, the series has been largely locked dead even (currently split at 22–21–0 in Grambling's favor, through the 2016 season). One of the more noteworthy annual games that later converted into a classic was the Southern–Tennessee State series. Known as the Buck-Boar Classic starting with the 1958 contest, the losing school was required to hunt wild game that was to serve as the main course of the winning school's meal at their annual sports banquet—if SU lost, it was to hunt for deer in Louisiana's swamps and deliver the venison to TSU's banquet; if TSU lost, it was to hunt for wild hogs in the Tennessee mountains and deliver the ham to SU's banquet.
The Prairie View Bowl, which was first held at the end of the 1928 season, normally featured Prairie View A&M pitted against a school deemed to have had a worthy enough year to play in the season-ending game. Florida A&M's similar Orange Blossom Classic began in 1933 as a black equivalent to the segregated Orange Bowl (which was founded the year before as the Festival of Palms Bowl and was originally automatically hosted each season by the University of Miami). By the same token the Sugar Cup Classic—which was hosted yearly by Grambling in New Orleans—offered an alternative to the segregated Sugar Bowl.
All HBCUs compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) level or below in college football, but because of the commitments of some universities (especially Southwestern Athletic Conference schools) to classic games, they may forgo the opportunity to play in the national playoffs. The famed Bayou and Turkey Day classics, for example, are closely associated with Thanksgiving weekend—which directly conflicts with the playoffs' opening round. Labor Day weekend, however, still remains the biggest weekend for classics—including the Labor Day Classic, the John A. Merritt Classic, the MEAC/SWAC Challenge, and the Palmetto Capital City Classic.