Battle at Bristol
American college football game
The Battle at Bristol was an American college football game played at Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee, on Saturday, September 10, 2016, between the University of Tennessee Volunteers and the Virginia Tech Hokies. It holds the record for NCAA football's largest single-game attendance at 156,990. Sponsored by truck stop chain Pilot Flying J, the game was known as the Pilot Flying J Battle at Bristol.
History
The first time football was ever played at Bristol Motor Speedway was an NFL exhibition game, held on September 2, 1961, between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Redskins. The seating capacity for the speedway in 1961 was 18,000 people. Attendance for the game totaled 8,500 people.
The idea of a marquee college football game at Bristol Motor Speedway (BMS) was originally proposed in 1997. After years of planning and scheduling, a contract was eventually finalized in 2013 for a 2016 game. The event was originally named the Battle at Bristol, between Tennessee and Virginia Tech. From the beginning, a primary goal and reason for holding the game at Bristol Motor Speedway was to break the all-time college football attendance record (previously 115,109; set on September 6, 2013, in Ann Arbor, Michigan for a game between Michigan and Notre Dame).
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle at Bristol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.