2024 College Football Playoff quarterfinal sites set based on existing conference bowl agreements

Due to existing deals with bowl games, the SEC and Big Ten champions will be assigned the Sugar and Rose Bowls in the College Football Playoff this season.

That was confirmed Wednesday during the CFP’s webinar, detailing everything inside and out of this year’s 12-team playoff. With that being the case, at least for two more years until the contract is up, the ACC champion and Big 12 champion will be in the Peach and Fiesta Bowls, respectively, due to proximity.

The College Football Playoff’s Senior Director of Communications and Branding Brett Daniels explained.

“The Orange Bowl is a semifinal this year, so the ACC has the historical ties to the Orange Bowl, but is a semifinal,” Daniels said. “And so because of that, Florida State, from a proximity standpoint, would be sent to the Peach Bowl. The Peach and Fiesta and the Cotton as well, don’t have contractual relationships with any of the conferences, so they’re a little bit more flexible in teams that can be assigned to those locations. 

“The Cotton Bowl being a semifinal this year wasn’t in play the way the Fiesta and the Peach were in this exercise next year. That’ll change. The Fiesta and the Peach will serve as semifinals. And so the ACC champion would be eligible to go down to the Orange Bowl as a quarterfinal, and the Cotton Bowl would be available (as an) at-large catch there for the fourth conference champion.”

On a related note, the College Football Playoff committee hasn’t heard about any changes to home field advantage for the first round games. There was a question posed to CFP Executive Director Rich Clark if any schools reached out about using neutral sites or NFL stadiums in their respective areas for home playoff games.

“Not yet … it could happen,” Clark said. “But as of now, at least the teams that as we’ve come through the season, as you can imagine, some of the teams are not really in consideration. So the teams that still are, they have all indicated that they will play their game where they normally play their own games. So that’s the case as it stands right now.

“If something happened, and we haven’t seen this yet, but if something did happen where a team couldn’t play in their home stadium, and I’m only talking hypothetically, they could say, you know, there’s a stadium nearby, there’s a stadium that is better suited, because, for whatever reason, for us to play the game, And we would have that discussion with them, but that would have to be a discussion between us and them.”