From The Athletic
IRVING, Texas — Construction is underway several floors up in a nondescript office building just off the highway. Tarps, tape, the works cover offices. On the other side of the elevator bank, behind a door with a big gold football logo, another kind of construction is nearing completion.
When the College Football Playoff and conference commissioners unveiled a 12-team expansion proposal in 2021, the size of the field was the headline change. But just as interesting to many fans was the new first round: four games played at the home stadiums of the teams seeded No. 5 through No. 8, instead of bowl sites. One game will take place Friday, Dec. 20, with three following in a tripleheader on Saturday Dec. 21.
The new format sparked a high level of excitement and an unprecedented undertaking. After decades of the sport’s postseason taking place almost exclusively off campus, college football’s top playoff will, for the first time, feel like actual college football.
“There was a feeling that the home game opportunity was healthy for fans, not having to travel,” said SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, part of the four-member subgroup that began exploring expansion in 2019.
College football games are massive events that reshape the economics of college towns on gameday more so than pro sports do for major cities. Schools and CFP staff have spent the past year and half putting together all the logistics, gaming out every conceivable detail, from visitors’ seating options to the best way to put the CFP patch on the jerseys. The process culminated in an 87-page manual the CFP released to schools in August, since obtained by
The Athletic. But the work is still ongoing. The plans for ticket prices recently changed again.
“It’s been a daunting task,” said CFP chief operating officer Byron Hatch. “But we have a really good staff here. The big rocks, the big areas to run a football game, we’re covered.”
With the first set of in-season CFP rankings coming out on Tuesday, the years of planning will move closer to reality for the four schools eventually selected to host, and everyone agrees with what Sankey said in Nashville earlier this month: This has to go right.
“For some of these schools,” said CFP executive director Rich Clark, “it’s going to be the biggest game they’ve ever had on their campus.”
Will it feel like a home game?
For most of college football’s 100-plus-year history, the postseason has made little to no sense. Championships were long determined by polls. Bowl games began in the 1900s as local exhibitions for economic benefit. Over time, the bowl executives became power brokers that played a role in the national championship. Outside of Miami winning some national championships in its Orange Bowl home stadium and
UCLA playing in the Rose Bowl stadium (neither of which are located on campus), the postseason was played at neutral sites. That continued with the BCS and the four-team College Football Playoff. The closest comparison to a true home game with the stakes of December’s first round might be Group of 5 conference championship games and lower-division playoffs.
Finally, for one round, the FBS postseason will have true home-field flair, and the CFP wanted to make sure the games felt like home games. All 134 stadiums were eligible. Although schools can choose a neutral site to host, Clark said Wednesday that every school in the mix this year plans to use its home field. Schools can hold their normal home game rituals, including run-out music, third-down crowd prompts and traditions between quarters.
Clemson can run down the Hill. Oregon’s duck mascot can ride out on a motorcycle.
“A team earned the right to play at home, and along with that comes pageantry,” former CFP executive director Bill Hancock said. “College football is pageantry.”
The visiting team will also be allowed to use its traditional run-out with music and a video, if it would like, according to the manual. If the visiting team brings its band, it, too, will perform at halftime. Both bands would get six minutes and 30 seconds as part of the 22-minute halftime – a break two minutes longer than the regular season but normal for previous CFP games.
The field will be painted as normal, with a CFP logo somewhere on the field, and the CFP will provide goal post wraps. The CFP will control digital signage and in-game entertainment. If you hate the recent trend of stadiums flashing all their lights after touchdowns, some good news: That’s not allowed. Schools must cover up any lower-bowl advertising that might show up on TV and use CFP sponsors, but their field sponsorships can remain. The game officials are pre-assigned by the CFP.
Much of this is similar to when schools host an NCAA championship event in any other sport. The difference is that a round of the baseball or soccer tournaments, or even an FCS playoff game, doesn’t bring in more than 100,000 people and a full ESPN production like this could. The CFP has Zoom meetings scheduled with team operations officials on the Sunday the field is finalized (Dec. 8), and an online portal will go live in November with each school’s information.
“Baseball, you get awarded a Super Regional and turn around within a week, but it’s very different than 101,000 at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium,” Texas executive senior associate AD Drew Martin said. “The scale is definitely different.”
Because the first-round games are not bowl games, there will be no postgame trophy presentation. Instead, there will be a recognition in the winning team’s locker room with representatives from the upcoming bowl quarterfinal.
How will tickets work?
First-round CFP hosts will handle seating similar to a normal home game, with some exceptions. Each conference has its own visiting ticket policies, from the number of tickets visitors are given to where those seats are located — only the SEC requires a block of seats in the lower bowl — so the CFP and the commissioners had to come up with a standardization.
The rules: Visiting teams will receive 3,500 tickets, with a maximum of 500 of those available to the band. The fans can be split up into no more than two blocks, with at least 1,500 in the lower bowl. The visiting team will decide where its band sits, but it must have access to the field.
Home teams will handle their ticket sales however they would like. Most expect to give first dibs to their season-ticket holders like they would any other postseason game and handle it like a typical home game. Prices were originally set to be equal to the highest-priced home game from the previous two years, but after questions about donations and seat licenses, the CFP has set a flat set of ticket prices for every site. Tickets will cost between $100 and $250 for general seating, not including clubs and suites. (The CFP will retain all ticket revenue and redistribute to the conferences.)
“We want it to be as similar to a normal home game as possible,” said CFP director of premium and ticket sales Michael Bos. “We’re trying to have them make as few changes as possible.”
Schools are still figuring out when they want to put the possible home game tickets on sale.
Alabama has made them available, sticking to its usual midseason timeline for presenting fans with their postseason options, while Texas will open sales up next week. Bos would like all of the schools to get moving, so there is a better idea of how it will look.
The big unknown remains students. Schools will be on winter break, and many will have completed winter graduation ceremonies.
Notre Dame will keep its dorms open an extra 24 hours for students, if the Irish host. Student tickets will cost $25 and are not included in any season-long plan, per the CFP.
“The biggest question we’re getting is, what do we do if our students don’t show up?” Bos said. “
Ohio State’s holding 29,000 student tickets, Texas A&M’s 39,000. Some schools are concerned, so we’re trying to figure out when to go on sale. Some schools are far away. We’re still talking a lot about that to see what everybody else is doing.”
The answer is that nobody really knows how this will go. The CFP and schools are hoping for the best and will adjust next year depending on what happens.
How are stadiums getting ready?
When Texas hosted Georgia on Oct. 19, more than 1,000 part-time staff were needed to put the event together, on top of normal staff and nonprofits. The scene outside Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium included food and drink vendors, team stores, large TV screens, a Ferris wheel and other carnival games and rides. During the game, it all had to be cleared out so streets would be open as fans left the game.
Every college football Saturday is a massive event, whether it’s a metropolitan area like Austin or a smaller town like Clemson, and game dates are set months or years in advance. A CFP first-round game will be set with two weeks’ notice, so schools have had to make sure they have everyone on call, from concession staff to nonprofit groups and more. (Unlike with tickets, schools will keep all concession and parking revenue.)
“It’s that temporary part-time staff that operates gates, ushers, concessions on short notice, that’s the one that causes me personally the most trepidation,” Martin said. “But we have great companies with infrastructure and have assured us we’re OK. Until we live through it, that’s a wild card.”
In those smaller college towns, game day hotels and rentals are big business because they’re scarce. Securing visiting team hotels was a top priority. Working with the agency Collegiate Sports Travel, the CFP sent out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to hotels in all 134 FBS towns in fall 2022 to see what was possible. Hatch and the CFP eventually signed hotel contracts in about 90 markets, with plans to whittle that number down as teams fell out of CFP contention. The first cut day is next Wednesday, and the CFP will cancel a majority of those hotel contracts. Sorry, Tallahassee.
Visiting teams are expected to handle travel like a normal road game, arriving in town the day before the game. But home schools were required to secure off-site practice fields in case the visiting team wants to practice, perhaps if they travel cross-country and arrive a day earlier.
There is nothing the CFP and schools can do about the weather but hope for the best.
Penn State winterized Beaver Stadium for the purpose of winter events like the CFP, and other schools have prepared as best they can. Schools hosted December games during the pandemic-impacted 2020 season, but with limited fans in attendance.
“Playing a game in December in Provo could be really exciting and also snowy and really cold,”
BYU athletic director Tom Holmoe said. “We usually shut the stadium down in November. You’ll have to keep it alive.”
Into the unknown
It’s inherently awkward for schools to talk about home CFP games in early November. The possibility of hosting implies they didn’t win their conference championship. There has been chatter among administrators over why the top four seeds in the CFP won’t get to play at home. The bye to the second round is the reward, and that won’t change. The new CFP deal, running from 2026 through 2031, keeps the bowls involved past the first round, whether or not the field expands beyond 12.
“We all like the tradition of the bowls, but moreso, the bowl committees know how to put on games and hospitality and game operations,” Hancock said. “They know how to do that better than anybody.”
For the CFP staffers, this is exciting and nerve-racking new territory. They’re not in full control. They trust schools’ ability to host games, but no one’s gone through something like this at this scale before, and the turnaround will be so quick. The
NFL also scheduled two big matchups opposite the CFP on Saturday, a not-so-subtle shot across the bow.
Clark, the former
Air Force lieutenant general and academy superintendent, is just four months into the job leading the CFP, but he spent months shadowing Hancock. On the eve of college football history, he compares this preparation to his military work in a simple way: land the plane.
“When you fly and there’s an emergency, you make sure you have the engines working, you have the gear down, and if you have that done, you can get the plane on the ground,” he said. “We’re getting the gear down. We still have engines cooking, and we’ll be able to do this.”
Chris Vannini covers national college football issues and the coaching carousel for The Athletic. A co-winner of the FWAA's Beat Writer of the Year Award in 2018, he previously was managing editor of CoachingSearch.com. Follow Chris on Twitter
@ChrisVannini
