Fan ban behind Rose relocation
Tide, Irish want some live cheering in stands
PASADENA, Calif. — The College Football Playoff semifinal between topranked Alabama and Notre Dame was supposed to be the Rose Bowl. Well, the Jan. 1 game still could be called the Rose Bowl — more on that to come — but it won’t be played in Southern California.
The semifinal has been moved from Pasadena to AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, ostensibly based on the growing number of COVID-19 cases in the Los Angeles area, but more significantly because of the resulting ban on fans at spectator sports in California.
The decision to move the game was not unexpected, and it was driven primarily by the objections of the contending schools to flying across the country to play without fans.
It’s still unclear whether the game in the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium will be called the Rose Bowl, but the decision ended a streak of 78 straight years in Pasadena for a bowl game first played in 1902.
The festive week of genteel celebrations around the Rose Bowl game already had been mostly canceled, interrupting a beloved annual holiday tradition for hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles-area residents and tens of thousands of visiting fans.
In July, organizers scrapped the Tournament of Roses Parade, an event dating to 1890 — including every year since 1945. Thousands typically camp out on the streets of Pasadena on New Year’s Eve to secure the best spots to watch the parade.
The Rose Bowl game had been played in verdant Arroyo Seco every year since 1942, when the West Coast was deemed unsafe because of the attack on Pearl Harbor just 3½ weeks earlier. Oregon State beat Duke in Durham, North Carolina, in that Rose Bowl, but the game had been played in Pasadena in every January since.
The tradition-loving Rose Bowl already had changed with the evolution of various playoff systems over the past two decades. The game was no longer guaranteed its preferred annual matchup between Pac-12 and Big Ten opponents, yet it remained among the most coveted postseason destinations.
This matchup would have been among the biggest in the stadium’s history, too. Notre Dame has played in the Rose Bowl only once: In 1925, legendary coach Knute Rockne and his Four Horsemen beat Pop Warner and Stanford to complete an unbeaten season.