When the Duke's Mayo Bowl selected North Carolina as one of its participating teams earlier this month, one of the most significant questions, at least publicly, was whether Sam Howell would play in it or decide to opt out.
Howell, the Tar Heels' junior quarterback, entered the season as a Heisman Trophy candidate. After a 6-6 regular season, no one would have been surprised if he'd decided to skip UNC's bowl game and prepare for the NFL Draft, where he's still likely to be an early-round selection.
On Dec. 7, two days after UNC's Mayo Bowl destination became official, Howell ended the suspense. In a post on Twitter, he shared a short video of Homer Simpson opening a jar of mayonnaise and emptying its contents into his mouth, the mayo smoothly pouring out of the jar as if it were soft-serve ice cream. Simpson swallows it all, and then winces, as if from stomach pain.
"Catch y'all in Charlotte," Howell wrote, adding a winky-face emoji.
Howell's tweet served two purposes though one, perhaps, might have been unintentional. First, he ended the speculation that he might opt out, and his decision to play gave the Duke's Mayo Bowl a marketable storyline: Howell began his college years with a victory against South Carolina in Charlotte in 2019, and now his final college game (though he hasn't announced it as such, it's widely accepted that it will be) will come against the same team, in the same venue.
Second, Howell's tweet contributed to the light, whimsical ethos of the game itself. Perhaps more than any other bowl game, the Duke's Mayo Bowl has become a self-aware character of its own, and one that doesn't take itself all that seriously. It is a game sponsored by a condiment company, and a mayonnaise company at that, and it's not unreasonable to assume that after Homer swigged that jar of mayo he sat down and watched some football himself (maybe after taking some Pepto).
The Duke's Mayo Bowl is one of 42 bowl games (not including the championship game of the College Football Playoff) and it rarely offers the kind of attractive pairing to rise above the oversaturated marketplace of bowl games. Howell's decision to play is a bonus for the game this year, and so is the good fortune of the all-Carolinas match-up between North Carolina and South Carolina.
Yet when the Tar Heels and Gamecocks play each other on Thursday at Bank of America Stadium, the sporting public — outside of both teams' fans — will be less interested in the result between two 6-6 teams and more interested in, well, mayonnaise. And the postgame mayonnaise bath for the winning head coach, in particular. A spokesman for the game last week said staffers have been working to discover the correct viscosity for the ceremonial mayo dunking.
Too thick and the mayonnaise will sort of plop out onto either South Carolina's Shane Beamer or North Carolina's Mack Brown, and nobody wants to see either coach doused in chunky, gelatin-like mayo. Too runny, though, and the integrity of the mayonnaise will be compromised, and nobody wants to see that, either, especially in the Carolinas, where Duke's is based and often the choice for the serious mayo connoisseur.
"We've been working on this for months," Miller Yoho said of the Mayo bath.
Officially, Yoho, 34, is the Director of Communications and Marketing for the Charlotte Sports Foundation, which organizes the Duke's Mayo Bowl. Unofficially, Yoho is the guy who runs the game's popular Twitter account, and therefore he's also its voice — the Oz-like figure behind the curtain who has given personality to a mayonnaise brand, and the college football games it sponsors (there's also the annual kickoff event at the start of the season).
In an interview last week, Yoho was quick to credit Duke's, which is based in Greenville, South Carolina, "for being whimsical, for being in on the joke."
"We broke a trophy," he said, referencing a memorable postgame mishap last year, when the championship trophy broke before Wisconsin could depart with it. "We didn't do a mayo bath, and they rolled with all of that in a way a lot of sponsors wouldn't."
The 20th anniversary of Charlotte's bowl game will arrive next December but this game, on Thursday, will be the 20th such game — assuming it is spared the COVID-19-related fate of other games that have been canceled in recent days. When Charlotte first hosted the Meineke Car Care Bowl in 2002, it blended into the scenery of the college football postseason. It was mostly just another bowl game throughout its first decade, even after Belk took over naming rights in 2011.
The game started to become a bit more noticeable in the mid-2010s — around the time, not coincidentally, when Yoho began running its Twitter account. In time, he created a persona that broke through the noise of social media, one that seemed organic while still accomplishing the goal of promoting the brand and the games it sponsors.
Nowadays, the Duke's Mayo Bowl Twitter account has nearly 40,000 followers — third among all bowl game accounts, and behind only the Peach Bowl and Rose Bowl. The account's recent tweets include an image of a trip to Belk's — "feels familiar," Yoho wrote, garnering more than 400 likes — and a retweet of someone lamenting the lack of recent clever tweets from @DukesMayoBowl.
"Was just thinking the same thing," the game responded, in a self-deprecating manner.
Yoho also shared a screenshot, originally from Reddit, of an ESPN graphic that included quotes from Beamer and Brown about the prospect of a postgame mayo bath on Thursday. Said Beamer: "I'm not a big mayonnaise guy. I mean, I'll gladly take one for the team on that one if it means we won a football game, but woof." And Brown, in a line that sounded like it came from a story in The Onion: "If we won the game, I'd let someone hit me in the face with a frying pan ... I don't care."
The Mayo Bowl, in sharing the quotes, offered a simple reaction: "lol, what a world ..."
In reality, the mayo dunking will be a ceremonial, scripted affair. It will not happen in the immediate aftermath of the game, Yoho said, noting that Bank of America Stadium has new turf. Instead, it will be staged. To convince the coaches to go along with the idea, Duke's offered the winning coach $10,000 for the charity of his choice.
Beamer and Brown gave their OKs, opening the door for what's sure to be one of the most viral social media moments of the college football postseason.
"They're going to have to sit there with all the cameras on them," Yoho said of whomever the winning coach is, "and just take it."
The mayo bath fits into the lighthearted nature of the game's social media presence, which fits into the lighthearted nature of some of the game's surroundings, which include various mayo-related promotional material and, perhaps, coordinated marketing. When Clemson and Georgia played in Charlotte at the start of the season, in a game also sponsored by Duke's Mayo, various fans just happened to be caught on camera consuming unhealthy amounts of the condiment — Homer Simpson style.
"Duke's Mayo takes what it does seriously, but they don't take themselves seriously," Danny Morrison, the director of the Charlotte Sports Foundation, said earlier this week. "So we've had fun with it, and both coach Brown and coach Beamer have embraced the fun concept."
Going back to the mayo dunking, Morrison added: "We said, 'Well all the fans last year were clamoring for a Duke's Mayo bath.' " This year, assuming the game happens, it'll come to fruition. Yet even when it ends, the Duke's Mayo Bowl could take advantage of opportunities to still get weird, Yoho said — though perhaps not exactly using that description.
Now that college athletes have the right to enter into endorsement deals, the game's MVP could be in line for a role in an advertisement, the way that NFL players have long shouted, "I'm going to Disney World!" after winning the Super Bowl. Yoho didn't offer specifics of how it might work, but did provide a hint: Picture a player watching the College Football Playoff national championship game, lounging on the couch, a big TV in front of him. And in his hands: a big jar of mayonnaise.
