2020-01-11 08:00:00
Once, New Orleans was the site of de facto college football national championship games five times in a seven-year span.
Then, during the BCS era, it was the official venue four times in 12 years.
But eight years have passed since that night in 2012 when LSU was blanked by Alabama 21-0 and Monday’s opportunity for the Tigers claim their first CFP title.
And it might be as long a span, if not more, before it happens again.
“They haven’t put any more out for bid yet,” said Allstate Sugar Bowl chief executive officer Jeff Hundley, whose organization headed the effort to land this game. “So we’ll have to wait and see.
“Everybody feels very positive so far, but we’ll have time to reflect later on once the bills are paid.”
Those bills include the $8 million the Sugar Bowl put up out of its own reserves to land the bid when the state couldn’t come up with money. That won’t happen again.
LSU quarterback Joe Burrow chatted about Trevor Lawrence, the championship against Clemson and more ahead of Monday’s game.
And, as Hundley said, bids for the final two years in the current 12-year CFP contract — for the 2024 and 2025 seasons have yet to come out, or, more properly, the CFP has not identified cities it will invite to submit proposals to host the games, a policy it initiated for the next four years of title games.
CFP executive director Bill Hancock said the request for the proposal stage is about two years away.
And after those past two games, things are very much up in the air.
While there is a growing consensus that the playoff field will expand from four to eight teams, the format has not been determined, including what role the bowls will continue to play and just what would be expected of the cities that want to be the site of the championship games.
Not that there isn’t a lack of them.
After rotating the BCS championships between the Sugar Bowl, Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl and Fiesta Bowl, the CFP, which deals with cities rather than the bowls, will have been played at 10 different venues in its first 10 years (Dallas; Tampa, Florida; Phoenix; Atlanta; San Francisco; New Orleans; Miami; Indianapolis and Houston) with indications that two newcomers — Las Vegas and Minneapolis — will get the remaining two.
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Charlotte, where Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper is talking about a retractable dome stadium suitable for Super Bowls and the Final Four, could also be a player along with Nashville, Tennessee.
Returning to one of the first 10, including New Orleans, doesn’t seem to be part of the conversation as yet.
“Ten in 10 has certainly worked out well for us,” Hancock said. “But we might go back to our more traditional sites in the future.
“We just don’t know yet.”
And while eight years might seem like an extraordinary length of time for a city so used to hosting big events, decade-long lapses are the new normal as new stadiums come on line, often with the promise of those big events.
The Men’s Final Four will be played in New Orleans in 2022, 10 years after Anthony Davis led Kentucky to the NCAA championship. The 2024 Super Bowl in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome will be the first in the building since the Baltimore Ravens defeated the San Francisco 49ers in 2013. That’s one year more than the previous widest gap between games in a city that’s been the site of 10 Super Bowls.
But Jay Cicero, president and CEO of the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation, said the lengthening cycles are not necessarily a bad thing.
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“The further out you get, the better it actually works for us,” Cicero said. “New Orleans is a very popular city, and we have to work really hard to find the right spots and certain years when hotel availability, for example, is better.
“For the further out something is, the better shot we have to make that availability happen.”
That doesn’t include, Cicero added, events like WrestleMania and the NBA All-Star game, which has less hotel requirements.
This spring New Orleans will host the Women’s Final Four for a record fourth time and next year the SEC Women’s Gymnastics championships return.
The financial benefits of the CFP to the city also have been brought into question because of short amount of time spent by visiting fans, which especially this year with LSU in the game, and the lack of sponsorship money available to the local organizing committees to recoup their costs.
That was part of the reason the Rose Bowl was not interested in being the site of a championship game. The new NFL stadium in Los Angeles with its own local organizing committee is handling that responsibility.
Hundley pointed out that the limited amount of tickets made available to the Sugar Bowl were used to help cover expenses, not to be profitable for the bowl.
“We’ve got to look hard and fast at where we go from here,” he said. “We like to brag that New Orleans always fights above its weight class when it comes to getting big events, but the truth is we don’t have the number of large businesses that Dallas or Houston or Miami or Phoenix have.
“What we did the last time out was our gift to the city and state we saw as part of our civic duty. But it’s not a good business model.”
The Sugar Bowl will continue to be the site of two CFP semifinals and four SEC-Big 12 matchups over the remaining six years of that contract. While all parties have expressed their pleasure with the arrangement, despite poor attendance at two of the four SEC-Big 12 games, there have been no commitments about the future and certainly no talk about “preserving the status of the Sugar Bowl” as has been the Big Ten and Pac-12 language about the Rose Bowl in discussions about issues such as playoff expansion and playing the semifinals on Jan. 1 every year instead of moving them around.
Hancock praised the idea of the semifinals being played on Saturdays — “Saturdays are the day for college football,” although the next two sets of semis — next season in the Sugar Bowl and the Orange and Cotton bowls in 2021 – will be played on Friday nights. He also said that the championship game works best on Mondays, especially since the first two weekends in January are the domain of the NFL playoffs.
One thing that won’t change in the foreseeable future about big event sports in New Orleans is they’ll be played in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, which turns 45 this year.
“It may not be the newest stadium in the country,” Cicero said. “But every time I walk out on the field, it knocks my socks off when I realize what a great host facility we have.
“We’re about to go though another set of renovations that will keep the Superdome up to date. We’ve got a lot of challenges out there, but thankfully replacing the Superdome isn’t one of them.”
Future CFP Semifinals and Championship Games
Season///Semifinals Date///Bowls///Championship Date//Site
2020///Jan. 1, 2021///Sugar and Rose///Jan. 11, 2021///Miami
2021///Dec. 31, 2021///Orange and Cotton///Jan. 10, 2022///Indianapolis
2022///Dec. 31, 2022//Peach and Fiesta///Jan. 9, 2023///Los Angeles
2023///Jan. 1, 2024//Sugar and Rose///Jan. 8. 2024///Houston
2024///Dec. 28, 2024///Orange and Cotton///Jan. 6, 2025///TBA
2025///Dec. 27, 2025///Peach and Fiesta///Jan. 5, 2026///TBA
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