Sunday's Arkansas-Pine Bluff-Alabama A&M game, slated to be played in St. Louis, has been moved to Pine Bluff's campus, the school has announced.
The game was billed as the St. Louis River City HBCU Classic, to be played at The Dome at America's Center. However, citing "unfulfilled contractual obligations," both schools determined they were not confident promoters would follow through on "the game's venue, transportation, housing accommodations and whether other agreed-upon expenses."
The game has been removed from the Explore St. Louis website.
Milestone Marketing and Distribution Group handled promotions for the game, and a local source told STLAmerican that poor ticket sales forced the group to pull the plug.
“Mr. Gilbert’s assertions contained in his media release dated 10/12/22 are a red herring overlooking the fact that he was unable to secure a title sponsor for the event and general tickets sales were poor due to his late start in selling tickets. In addition, financial terms of the contract with Milestone Marketing and Distribution Group, Inc. were not fulfilled," the source told the site
"We are thankful to our university administration and athletics department staff for quickly pivoting to ensure we are able to host Alabama A&M so that fans can still see this matchup between the football teams and experience our band and the excitement of our cheer squads," UAPB AD Chris Robinson said. "We were excited about taking our team, band, cheer squads and fans to St. Louis and hope that we're able to do so in the near future."
The game will now be played at UAPB's Simmons Bank Field. All tickets purchased for the St. Louis game will be honored in Pine Bluff.
“Although we are disappointed at not being able to participate in the St. Louis HBCU River City Classic, we are excited to be back on the campus at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff,” said Alabama A&M AD Paul Bryant.
The events of this week bring to mind Deion Sanders's comments from this spring, questioning the wisdom of HBCU schools outsourcing a portion of their schedule to third-party promoters to stage off-campus games.
“We’re losing money, tremendously. This particular classic that you’re talking about, first of all, why would two colleges need a promoter? You’re two colleges and you have A.D.s, why would you need a promoter, that’s No. 1," he said at the time.
“Secondly, I think the fee was like over 30 years, $6 million. That’s peanuts. So by the time you take seven buses for the band, four buses for the players, couple (buses) for people, assistants, hotel accommodations, food, you’re out of that. That $180-200 grand, you’re out of that. So you didn’t make nothing. You really came up there on a blank trip. We gotta stop that foolishness. The first thing we need to take care of as HBCUs is the business aspect of everything, and that’s something we’re changing right now. We’re taking care of business.”
UAPB heads into Sunday's game at 2-4 overall and 0-3 in SWAC play, while Alabama A&M is an identical 2-4 overall but 2-1 in conference play.