When it comes to college football bowl games, the Military Bowl is a mid-tier bowl game at best…read morebased on history/prestige and payout. Established in 2008, it's no longer one of the newer bowls, but it's not decades old either. For the first six years of its existence, the bowl didn't have a consistent matchup of teams; in other words, one dedicated conference versus another. Instead, it turned out to be a mixed bag of teams from the middle-to-lower rungs of the ACC, the then-Pac-10, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Western Athletic Conference, and Navy (during its time as an independent). Since 2014, the bowl has "stabilized" to feature a team from the ACC versus a team from the AAC (American Athletic Conference). To give you an idea of the caliber of Military Bowl participants during this stretch, the team from the ACC usually had a 4-4 or 3-5 conference record (mediocre). The team from the weaker AAC usually had a better conference record at 7-1 or 6-2, most of the time. In its entire history, the bowl has featured an AP-ranked team three times: No. 24 San Jose State (2012), No. 21 Navy (2015), and No. 13 Temple (2016). The ACC vs. AAC arrangement is contracted through the 2025-26 season. As an ACC and Wake Forest fan, I've had mild interest in this bowl. Wake has played in this bowl two times. Both were victories. In 2008, the Demon Deacons beat Navy, 29-19, in the first-ever Military Bowl (then known as the EagleBank Bowl). In 2016, the Deacs returned and beat No. 23 Temple, 34-26. I think the best ACC team to have played in this bowl to date was the 2010 Maryland team that blew out East Carolina, 51-20. After that game, the Terrapins finished the season 9-4 (5-3 ACC) with an AP ranking of No. 23. Former Georgia Tech (my alma mater) OC Ralph Friedgen was the head coach of Maryland at that time. From 2008 to 2012, the bowl was held at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. Since 2013, the games have been played at the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis. The Military Bowl has consistently had ticket sales above 24,000 and on six occasions, had sales in excess of 30,000. Its payout was a little over $2 million in 2019, putting it in the middle of the pack among active bowl games. Like other bowl games, where the Military Bowl's value is perhaps most important is to the local economy - the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area in this instance - and its partner, the USO. Over the last decade, the bowl has donated more than $1 million to the USO. Unfortunately, in 2020, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Military Bowl was cancelled because not enough teams were available to play. Many teams had opted not to play in bowl games in 2020.