The 2020 College Football Playoff will be here before you know it. What stadium will the 2020 national championship game be played at this January?
Championship Weekend is upon us in the 2019 college football season. Seven teams are still alive for the College Football Playoff: The Baylor Bears, Clemson Tigers, the Georgia Bulldogs, the LSU Tigers, the Ohio State Buckeyes, the Oklahoma Sooners and the Utah Utes. Only four of these magnificent seven teams will be getting in.
As part of the national semifinal rotation of the sixth annual College Football Playoff, the two bowls that will serve as national semifinals this year will be the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia and the Playstation Fiesta Bowl at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. The winner of those two games will play for a national title.
But where will the national title bout be played this January? Will it be at a location we are very familiar with as part of the New Year’s Six bowl games? Could it be at another stadium of note that does not annually hold one of the biggest bowl games of the holiday season? Will this national championship game’s location give any team still in the running an edge over the others?
For the 2019 college football season, the 2020 College Football Playoff National Championship Game will be played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana on Monday, January 13 at 8:00 p.m. ET, 7:00 p.m. CT. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome is the site of the Allstate Sugar Bowl, which is part of the New Year’s Six, as the annual bowl game the Big 12 plays the SEC.
While the two teams playing in this year’s Sugar Bowl will obviously not be a part of the national championship picture, we may very well get an ACC team, a Big Ten team or a Pac-12 team playing a game that absolutely matters at this location this year.
If any of the seven teams still alive for the Playoff are going to have an advantage playing in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, it would undeniably be the LSU Tigers, who play only miles north of New Orleans in Baton Rouge. So they would have the best advantage here to play primarily in front of the home crowd should the Bayou Bengals play in their first title bout since 2011.
Other teams that are familiar with playing big games in New Orleans that are still in the mix are Georgia, who played in the Sugar Bowl last year, and Oklahoma, who usually dominate the Big 12. Clemson played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome two years ago when it was a national semifinal game. Ohio State played there too as part of the first national semifinal game in 2014.
So the only two teams that don’t have a familiarity with the Mercedes-Benz Superdome are Big 12 hopeful Baylor and Pac-12 hopeful Utah. Baylor hasn’t been good enough to reach the Sugar Bowl since it became the Big 12’s ideal game back in 2014. Utah would have no reason to play in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome if it weren’t part of the Playoff. The Utes dream of the Rose Bowl.
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