OZ Family Cigars Brings Back The “Cigar Game” Smoke For Football Season
As Labor Day weekend rolls around, most of us are in desperate search for summer’s last hurrah. Sadness over this season’s figurative end looms in the air, but a merciful cure waits around the corner with the return of football. College makes its full comeback to the gridiron this weekend, and the NFL follows next week. Looking ahead at the football season, there’s one game that must be marked on the calendars of all cigar lovers, the annual “Cigar Game” matchup between the Tennessee Volunteers and the Alabama Crimson Tide. And to make things even better, Tennessee-based OZ Family Cigars is renewing its Cigar Game Limited-Edition smoke and shipments have already reached retailers.
The official moniker for the annual Alabama-Tennessee football rivalry is “The Third Saturday in October.” The game isn’t always played on this exact date, as it used to be, but it’s still held around the same time every year. The rivalry stretches back to 1901, between colleges located just 310 miles from one another. The two schools have deep college football traditions, but the rivalry added a unique twist back in 1961.
The story goes that in ‘61, Alabama’s head trainer offered up cigars to the players if they could end their losing streak against Tennessee. The Tide won, the cigars were broken out, and ever since, it has been tradition that the winning team (and most of the fans in attendance) light up cigars in the stadium to celebrate victory. The tradition seemingly grows more popular by the year, with attendees on the winning side already with cigars lit by the time the head coaches shake hands after the game.
OZ Family Cigars, headquartered in Nashville, has been mixed up this rivalry the last few years. For the past two Tennessee victories over Alabama, at home in 2022 and 2024, OZ Family Cigars supplied the Volunteer locker room with the smokes for the post-game celebration. But last year, the company released cigars specifically for this game and fans of the Volunteers. The same smoke has returned, but this time with a much bigger production and earlier shipments.
The Cigar Game Limited-Edition is a one-size release, a soft-press toro measuring 6 inches long by 56 ring gauge. As with last year, the cigar is an extension of the company’s Firsat brand. It has the same blend as the rest of the line, with a high-priming Connecticut-seed wrapper from Ecuador, Ecuador Habano binder and Nicaraguan filler, some of which is grown on the volcanic island of Ometepe. The cigars will come in 12-count boxes, and retail for $14.95 a stick, or $179.40 a box. The cigars will once again be exclusive to Tennessee retailers.
Production has been pushed up considerably to 1,200 boxes, from just 300 last year. The cigars, like the rest of the Firsat line, are made in the Dominican Republic at Ernesto Perez-Carrillo’s Casa Carrillo factory. Tim Ozgener, owner of OZ Family Cigars, says the smokes immediately sold-out last year, and some retailers were forced to limit purchases to one stick per person. He listened to the requests of the Tennessee-based retailers, and delivered more volume and earlier shipments for the 2025 release. Half of the total production was sent out the first week of August, so the smokes could be on shelves ahead of Tennessee’s opening game and home opener the following week. Ozgener says another third of the production shipped out this week, with the final allotment set to ship out at a later date.
The pre-season, No. 24 ranked Volunteers are no strangers to big games, especially as part of the vaunted Southeastern Conference (SEC), and they’ll start the season with high-profile matchups early on. The first comes this Saturday, in what effectively is the opener to the full beginning of the college football season (a handful of teams got an early start last weekend). Tennessee is matched up against the Syracuse Orange, who made noise on the national stage last year, in the Aflac Kickoff game on ABC at noon this Saturday at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
Tennessee’s home opener comes next week on September 6 against East Tennessee State University. But the program’s biggest test before the Cigar Game rivalry is at home against the No. 5 Georgia Bulldogs on Saturday, September 13, at 3:30 pm. Tim Ozgener will be in Knoxville that week doing in-store events at local cigar shops (The Smoke Pit, Smokin' Joe's and Blue Smoke Cigar) in the lead up to the big game.
The smokey rivalry game against No. 8 Alabama is slated for Saturday, October 18, with the time to be determined. This year, the game heads back to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In the last four matchups in this rivalry, the home team has won each time. The Volunteers will look to change that this year, with cigars at the ready.
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