College football's first playoff championship game may be coming to the Cotton Bowl. No, not the old, art-deco Cotton Bowl in Fair Park but the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic, which has freed itself from the geographical shackles implied by its name and moved to Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.
ESPN, citing unnamed sources, reported the news today, saying that the Cotton Bowl Classic is the "prohibitive favorite" to host the national title game on January 12, 2015.
Suddenly, the decision to pick Dallas as headquarters of the yet-to-be-named successor to the Bowl Championship Series makes sense.
Other details about the contract that will govern big-time college football's playoffs for the next dozen years, like who will host the national semifinals -- and when and how often -- are still sketchy. What's clear is that the system will be as arcane as only college football can be, with six sites expected to rotate as hosts for the semifinals, the Cotton Bowl Classic reportedly among them.
Ah, the Cotton Bowl. Over at Grantland, Charles Pierce offers a thoughtful recap of the game itself, bookended by slightly wistful remembrance of what "always was an orphan among these traditional postseason extravaganzas."
No longer. Now, it's at JerryWorld, which is "a spectacle all on its own, looming above the Walmarts and brake-and-lube joints, the empty luxury housing developments and huge, blank-staring abandoned office parks, and all the rest of the essential archaeology of the latest collapse of the American economy, for which the area in and around Arlington, Texas, looks like ground zero. It is what's left there, after the ambulances go, as Dylan would say. It is not, in any case, where the Cotton Bowl game belongs."
