Jacksonville Jaguars

About Jacksonville Jaguars

The Jacksonville Jaguars are a professional American football team located in Jacksonville, Florida. They are currently members of the South Division of the American Football Conference (AFC) in the National Football League (NFL). The Jaguars, along with the Carolina Panthers, joined the NFL as expansion teams in 1995.

Every year the city hosts the Gator Bowl, an annual civic highlight traditionally accompanied by parties, ceremonies, parades and other events leading up to the game. The annual Florida-Georgia game is also played in Jacksonville.

The Gator Bowl stadium was built out of steel trusses during the Great Depression and was frequently built onto, with the final addition of the reinforced-concrete west upper deck coming in 1982. The stadium hosted short-lived teams in both the World Football League (Jacksonville Sharks/Express) and the United States Football League (Jacksonville Bulls) and the occasional NFL exhibition game. The city also hosted the American Football League All Star Game in 1967 and 1968. The city briefly attempted to lure the Baltimore Colts, whose owner Robert Irsay famously landed a helicopter in the stadium as thousands of Jacksonville citizens urged him to move the team there. City leaders also attempted to get the Houston Oilers to move to Jacksonville at one point in the late 1980s. Great efforts were made to lure the Oilers, including the creation of a "Jacksonville Oilers" banner and designation of a specific section of the Gator Bowl as a non-alcohol, family section for proposed home games.