When Curtis Symonds looks at the Southern Heritage Classic, he sees considerably more than a football game: He sees a model.
Long before Symonds became president and co-founder of the digital streaming platform HBCU GO, he knew Southern Heritage Classic founder Fred Jones Jr. Their relationship stretches back more than 30 years, to Symonds’ days as an executive at BET, when he helped bring Black college football, including the Classic, to national television.
Now the two are working together again.
HBCU GO will broadcast Saturday’s 37th Southern Heritage Classic featuring Alcorn State University and the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff at Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium. And on Friday, Symonds will serve as special guest speaker for the Classic Coaches Luncheon at the Renasant Convention Center.
But ask Symonds about the Classic and the conversation quickly gets bigger — not because he leaves the subject, but because, in his view, the Classic sits inside a larger question facing historically Black colleges and universities: How do HBCUs turn the enormous cultural power of Black college sports into greater visibility, revenue and long-term institutional strength?
Symonds talked with the Tri-State Defender this week about his long history with Jones, HBCU GO’s expanding reach, why television alone cannot fill stadiums, the financial disparities surrounding NIL and why HBCUs need to think differently about the business of athletics.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TSD: Your relationship with the Southern Heritage Classic goes back much further than HBCU GO, correct?
Curtis Symonds: I’ve known Fred Jones Jr. for over 30 years now. I helped him with the Classic years and years back when I was senior vice president of affiliate sales and marketing with BET.
I think people underestimate Fred. Fred does the majority of this Classic by himself. He doesn’t have a big army like many others who do bowl games on the PWI (predominately white institution) side, where they have 20 or 30 people working for them. Fred is basically a one-man shop with a few people to help him out. So to grow this thing over 35-plus years is a credit to him.
I was big on bringing Classics to BET. Fred was one of those. You had the Tennessee State-Jackson State game, and it became an annual game and a hotbed. I was the first one to put the Southern Heritage Classic on national television with BET, and that helped get more people aware. Then I left BET, and he went the ESPN route.
When I sold my HBCU GO channel to (media mogul) Byron Allen, I called Fred for a meeting and said, “Hey man, we need to work together. Let’s get the Classic on HBCU GO.”
TSD: What does HBCU GO bring to the Classic now that wasn’t there before?
Symonds: The way Allen Media Group has built this is that we have the game on our syndicated package on Saturday. So we’re reaching 99% of television households.
In a local market, you don’t only get the game on HBCU GO. You might get it on a CBS channel, a CW channel or another station in that market that bought the rights to our game. That gives you added distribution.
And then you’re talking about Amazon Prime, Roku and others. You’ve got a nice distribution package out there where people can now see more of the Southern Heritage Classic.
TSD: College football has seen enormous growth in media-rights revenue. Why hasn’t more of that money found its way to HBCUs?
Symonds: No one has been doing a big marketing job of getting the word out. People like yourself end up writing about it, and more and more people begin hearing about it. But we’re not doing a bang-up job around the country driving the visibility of HBCU sports.
Look at how ESPN promotes PWI games. You hear about a Saturday game on Monday. They’re telling people, “We’ve got this player and that player. Watch us at 12 o’clock, and we’ve got this game right behind it.” If you’re a sports nut, you’re right there.
In the old days of ESPN, they were covering HBCU sports, but you never knew about it. You had to flip around channels and go, “Oh, by the way, this HBCU game is on ESPN.”
We have a lot of people who are sports nuts, but we don’t have enough people out here telling the story hard enough.
TSD: But there’s another part of this. You’ve been pretty outspoken about HBCU fans actually coming inside the stadium.
Symonds: I keep saying, let’s talk about why we are not getting more people in the stadiums.
I’m giving you national television. I’m putting you in 99% of television households and more than 90% of Black households. Come on, help me out a little bit. Show off.
What happens in the HBCU circle is you might have 10,000 to 15,000 people outside tailgating who don’t even come into the stadium. They’d rather party outside than come into the game.
Older alumni will support because the university means something to them. But this new generation doesn’t necessarily have that same mindset.
TSD: Doesn’t television sometimes create that tension? If I can watch the game from home, why buy a ticket?
Symonds: Eddie Robinson taught me something about that years ago.
When I first came to BET in 1988, the great Eddie Robinson was still coaching Grambling. We rolled our trucks into Louisiana for a home game, and he would not let us on the football field. He said, “Oh no, you can’t show the game on television.”
He thought television was going to hurt the number of people in the seats.
It took me a long time to convince people: “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to add to it if you work with me.”
If you build a destination event like Fred has done with the Southern Heritage Classic, people are going to come because they want to experience the atmosphere. They see it on television and say, “Oh, man. I need to come to Memphis.” Even if their team isn’t playing.
TSD: And that seems particularly relevant to the Southern Heritage Classic because Fred Jones has built so much around the game itself.
Symonds: That’s the beauty of it. Years ago, there was a big Classic in Indianapolis — the Circle City Classic. They brought all kinds of different teams in, so it didn’t matter who played. People wanted to come for the culture.
And that’s what Fred has done with the Southern Heritage Classic. He’s built it to the point where he has a following. People know it.
That’s what we have to do more of — tell the story of everything that’s happening around these events nationally, not wait until Saturday for people to find out.
TSD: You’ve said before that HBCU GO wants to capture more than what’s happening inside the sidelines.
Symonds: I’ve got a new theme I’m getting my people behind: “HBCU GO: The culture is calling.”
When we say “culture” in our community, people usually mean Black culture. I’m talking specifically about HBCU culture — tailgates, fraternities, sororities, lifestyle, the whole nine yards.
We want people to get more in depth with what’s happening inside the culture at an HBCU. That’s what I’m trying to drive.
TSD: So when we talk about getting more people into the stadium, there’s also the perception that the best football is somewhere else — Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, the major PWI programs. Is that still part of the problem?
Symonds: It’s a mindset. And the other thing I keep preaching to presidents at HBCUs is that you’ve got to improve your facilities.
In today’s world, you can’t have a top-notch recruit walk into Prairie View’s weight room, then go over to the University of Houston and see twice the equipment. That recruit is looking at that and thinking, “No, no, no.”
A lot of athletes think, “If I go to an HBCU, I can’t get to the league. If I go here, I have a much better shot.” That isn’t necessarily true, but that’s the perception.
TSD: That gets us to name, image and likeness. What is the untold story of HBCU athletes and NIL?
Symonds: The untold story is that the universities don’t have the money like PWIs. They don’t have the big-time sponsors behind them.
Michigan puts more than 100,000 people in the stadium every game. Multiply that by what people are paying for tickets. That’s a lot of money.
At the PWIs, athletics is the flat-out moneymaker. Football at most of those big schools drives revenue for the entire athletic program. At an HBCU, athletics historically hasn’t been seen the same way. It’s more, “OK, we have sports.”
Now the whole game is money. If you want to grow, you’ve got to drive the money.
Our alumni, in some cases, are in positions where they could help, but they don’t put money into athletics on the scale you see elsewhere. And NIL has exposed that difference.
TSD: You also connect the money problem to alumni giving.
Symonds: Absolutely. I’m a Central State guy. I tell our alumni: If all of us put in $5 a month, we could build a decent endowment over a few years. Five dollars a month. That’s like going to get a beer.
If everybody put it in and let it grow, it would be a great way to show appreciation for the university that helped you do something.
And athletics is the same way. If people came back and really put a couple of dollars into the school, then you could improve facilities. You could attract better athletes. You could move the needle.
TSD: Can sports — particularly football at Division I HBCUs — actually help change the financial picture for these institutions?
Symonds: I think you’ve got to build relationships over time to do that. It isn’t something where you wave a wand and suddenly the picture changes.
The other problem at a lot of HBCUs is they don’t have somebody to manage that business side and get it going. They put it all on the coach or the athletic director. Well, they’re swamped trying to run the program. They’re trying to get to practice at 4 o’clock.
You need somebody whose job is building those relationships.
TSD: Right. Your coach and athletic director understand athletes and X’s and O’s. They may not necessarily be the first people you want walking into a corporate boardroom trying to build a multimillion-dollar relationship.
Symonds: Exactly. You hit it right there.
And the thing schools don’t always understand is that a person like that could basically pay for themselves — if you invested in them. That’s all. Invest in them.
TSD: You’ve said HBCUs have to start looking at athletics more like a business. But what are they ultimately selling?
Symonds: There’s nothing like an HBCU education. You are molded into somebody.
I grew up at Central State University. My mother worked there for 40 years teaching physical education and dance. My dad worked in maintenance for 50 years.
I was a physical education major. I followed my mom’s footsteps, but I’ve never taught a day in my life. I got into marketing and have been in it ever since.
And I tell kids all the time: If I can make it into some of the biggest media halls of fame in this business as a guy with a physical education degree, that should tell you something.
You can get there. But what’s your motivation to get there? You are molded into somebody. That’s what an HBCU can do.
The problem is we don’t tell young people that story early enough.
TSD: Which brings us back to something like the Southern Heritage Classic. It’s football, but Fred Jones has always positioned it as something larger — education, culture, entertainment, community. Is that part of why the model works?
Symonds: Absolutely. That’s why you build a destination. It isn’t just who wins the football game.
It’s the atmosphere. It’s the entertainment. It’s the culture. It’s people seeing themselves on television. It’s somebody sitting at home watching and saying, “I didn’t know all of this was going on.”
That’s what Fred has built. And that’s what we have to keep telling people.
You give people a reason to come — and then when they come, you give them something they want to come back to.
— For a schedule of Southern Heritage Classic events, visit https://southernheritageclassic.com/events.
