Indiana Preps | News & Opinion
For more than four decades, the Circle City Classic has meant one thing in Indianapolis: HBCU football at Lucas Oil Stadium. Indiana Black Expo founded the event in 1984 , and it grew into something much larger than a football game. Over that span, the Classic has contributed more than $340 million to the Indianapolis economy and helped IBE award more than $5 million in scholarships to students across the country. The first game featured a Mississippi Valley State team with a young Jerry Rice at wide receiver — and the tradition built from there into one of the most significant cultural celebrations in the Midwest.
Now it’s changing.
Indiana Black Expo announced a strategic shift for 2026, moving away from the traditional HBCU college football format and replacing it with high school football games and girls’ high school flag football. IBE is framing the decision as a strategic evolution — one designed to protect the financial sustainability of their primary fundraiser as corporate partnerships and audience engagement trends continue to shift.
The move is significant. The Circle City Classic has been a cornerstone of HBCU culture in the Midwest for over 40 years. It was one of only a handful of HBCU showcases in existence when it launched. Today there are more than 25 similar classics around the country, not counting homecoming celebrations — a landscape that looks nothing like the one IBE was operating in when Rev. Charles Williams founded the event. The competition for HBCU football attention has grown dramatically, and IBE is responding to that reality with a pivot toward the audience it can most directly reach and serve. That audience is Indiana’s youth. And that’s where this story becomes relevant to every high school athlete, family, and program in the state.
Putting Indiana high school football on the Lucas Oil Stadium stage — the same floor where the Colts play, where Indiana University just won a national championship, where the state’s biggest athletic moments happen — is not a small thing. For the programs selected to participate, it is a recruiting showcase, a program-building moment, and a memory that players will carry for the rest of their lives. For girls’ flag football, a sport that has grown rapidly in Indiana and across the country, it is exactly the kind of visibility that accelerates the trajectory of a program from emerging to established.
IBE’s mission has always centered on youth and family programming. The Classic funds that work year-round. The decision to anchor the event around high school athletics rather than college football is, in that sense, a return to the original intent — putting Indiana’s young people at the center of the biggest stage available to them.
The reaction to a change this significant will not be unanimous. The HBCU community has real and legitimate attachment to the Circle City Classic. The event was built to expose Midwest youth to HBCU universities and post-secondary opportunity , and that mission doesn’t disappear because the football format changes. IBE will have to demonstrate that the new format serves that mission as effectively as the old one — and the inclusion of an education and college fair component in future iterations of the Classic will matter enormously to that argument.
But from the perspective of Indiana high school athletics, the conversation is straightforward. The Circle City Classic just became one of the most significant opportunities available to a high school football program in this state. The programs that get selected will have earned something. The athletes who play in it will remember it. Lucas Oil Stadium has hosted some of Indiana’s greatest athletic moments. In 2026, high school football gets a seat at that table.