When the University of Georgia won the Southeastern Conference (SEC) Championship, they also won a trip to the Nokia Sugar Bowl on January 2, 2006. West Virginia University will be there, too, since they are champs of the Big East Conference. Get your Sugar Bowl tickets now to cheer on the Georgia Bulldogs or the West Virginia Mountaineers as they meet on the gridiron for the first time ever.

As one of the four host venues for the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), and as a holiday-time tradition dating back to 1935, the Sugar Bowl is very familiar to American sports fans. Every year the top college team of the South Eastern Conference (SEC), a highly ranked challenger from another major conference, and thousands of happy ticket-holders look forward to New Year's festivities in New Orleans culminating in a gridiron battle at the Louisiana Superdome, joined by millions more in the TV audience.

This year, however, the 71st Sugar Bowl will take place at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, due to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Consideration was given to holding the event in Baton Rouge, but Louisiana's capital currently shelters so many transplanted survivors of the devastation that there were not enough hotel rooms to accommodate thousands more. The Georgia Dome will be a busy place with the Peach Bowl to be held on December 30th, an Atlanta Falcons NFL game scheduled for January 1st, and the Nokia Sugar Bowl happening the very next evening!

The very first Sugar Bowl saw the Green Wave of Tulane University defeating the Temple Owls 20-14, and a tradition was born which continued on at Tulane Stadium, causing expansion of that facility to continue as well. When Notre Dame won the national title there in 1973, it was in front of a record 85,161 fans. Of course, the game was also watched across the U.S., having been telecast live coast to coast since 1953. In the 1960s, the Sugar Bowl was the first such contest to be broadcast nationwide in color and to be beamed to Hawaii via satellite.

The move to the Superdome (home arena for the National Football League's New Orleans Saints and site of six NFL SuperBowls) happened in 1975. As of 2005, the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University share a record for being invited to the Sugar Bowl 12 times. 'Bama's Crimson Tide was responsible for most of Paul "Bear" Bryant's eight Sugar Bowl wins but not his first; that one happened in 1951 when he was coaching Kentucky. LSU's most recent appearance occurred in 2004, a year when the Nokia Sugar Bowl was also designated the national championship.