Winter adds challenge to College Football Playoffs Friday night games

Welcome to the new-look postseason, where the path to the national championship begins at campus sites for eight of the 12 teams in the College Football Playoff. That opens things up in terms of potential weather. 

Whether this weekend’s official start of winter has a chilling effect on the outcome in the expanded 12-team playoff remains to be seen, but it’s a definite departure from warm climates Power Four teams are used to for postseason games.

The prospect of spending the Christmas and New Year’s Day holidays preparing for a bowl in a sunny locale is considered an incentivizing finish to a long season.

Snow showers are forecast to give way to cloudy skies and temperatures in the 20s in South Bend, Indiana, for Friday night’s Indiana-Notre Dame game.

A 10- to 15-mph northwest wind will make temperatures in the 20s feel like it’s in the mid teens in State College, Pennsylvania, on Saturday for SMU-Penn State.

Temperatures in the low 20s with a light breeze is forecast for Columbus, Ohio, for Tennessee-Ohio State on Saturday night. Austin, Texas, will feel like the tropics, by comparison, with sun and low 60s temperatures expected for Clemson-Texas.

The conditions will be less of a factor for Indiana, Notre Dame and Ohio State — all are accustomed to raw afternoons and evenings late in the season — and Tennessee plays its share of games in chilly weather.

For SMU, its game could be the coldest in program history. The lowest temperature at kickoff for the Mustangs was 24 degrees — Dec. 7, 2013, against UCF in Dallas and Dec. 24, 1983, against Alabama in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas.



(AP Photo Darren Cummings)