The Alabama-Clemson matchup in the CFP National Championship is matchup befitting a proper venue. Levi’s Stadium, and Santa Clara as a whole, is not it.
College football fans might consider this year’s national championship matchup between Alabama and Clemson a bit stale; the Tide and Tigers have met in the last four playoffs, with this representing the third time they have faced each other in a national championship game since 2015.
It’s hard to argue, however, that these aren’t the two best teams in college football, mirror images of each other as they each enter the game at 14-0. You need only look at the margins-of-victory this season for each team to see just how close they are comparably:
Alabama has beaten teams by an average of 31.5 points-per-game. Clemson has done it by 31.4 points-per-game. Other statistics bear it out, too: this game is a toss-up, with the outcome likely coming down to just a handful of plays.
That shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, as the two previous times the two faced off with the national championship on the line, we got a pair of classics that were decided by a grand total of nine points.
We also got a pair of venues – University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona and Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida – befitting the matchup between college football’s best teams.
This time, however, due in no small part to Larry Scott and the PAC-12’s urging for balanced venues, the national championship game ends up in a city that has proven to care less about college football, and a stadium that has been derided by NFL teams forced to play on the unsuitable turf.
The distance alone would be enough to drive fans from a pair of southern states away from making the long trek. Tuscaloosa and Clemson sit over 2,000 miles away from Santa Clara, clocking in at an undrivable 30-plus hours. That means you’d need to leave by Saturday early afternoon to even get there with a little bit of time to spare before kickoff.
The problem isn’t just the distance, it’s the accommodations once you are able to get there. There aren’t many direct flights from either preferred airport, Birmingham and Greenville, with a few being added in to appease fans who have a deep enough pocket book to make the trip feasible.
Those direct flights are priced at about $1,200 per ticket at best for a round-trip if you departed on Saturday and returned on Tuesday after the game. If you left on Friday instead, the flights are a little bit cheaper, but then you’re adding another night in an overpriced hotel that is likely to run you $300-$400 per night if you stayed anywhere close to the stadium.
When you add in meals and transportation to and from the stadium, you’re looking at over $2,000 per person before even buying a ticket to the game. These fanbases already traveled in droves to semifinal games to Miami and Dallas, respectively, with each of those locations being more accessible than Santa Clara.
(All of this presents another legitimate reason to not expand the college football playoff. An eight-team playoff would present further problems, if the first round isn’t played at the home stadium of the higher-seeded team, causing the fanbases that make the national championship to travel to neutral sites three times in a matter of a month.)
All of these factors have caused ticket prices to crater, with the average ticket price falling to the lowest it has ever been for a title game in the playoff era.
As of last night, according to Yahoo! Finance, the average re-sale price for a ticket to the game was $1,043, dipping below the 2016 version of the game played between Alabama and Clemson, which was also on the west coast in Glendale.
That price is expected to fall even further as the game inches closer.
At one point on Thursday, the low get-in price for a ticket was a little bit under $100. The lowest you can find at the moment is $120 per ticket for a nosebleed seat according to StubHub, still a far cry from what would be expected from such a high-stakes contest. You’d be hard pressed to find a seat in Bryant-Denny Stadium for less than that for a typical conference game; Death Valley in Clemson is likely the same way.
Since opening its doors in 2014, Levi’s Stadium has been littered with turf issues. The home of the San Francisco 49ers, there’s been a litany of complaints from opposing teams forced to play on turf where it is impossible to gain any traction.
There’s constant divots and even the occasional sinkhole. Players are often forced to switch out a variety of cleats to try and find something that allows their feet to stay underneath them, most notably during Super Bowl 50 between the Broncos and Panthers.
To the credit of the groundskeepers, they’ve done almost everything they can do to fix the issues. They’ve replaced the turf numerous times, including doing so just one week after the stadium’s debut in 2014. Nothing seems to really help, and the issues haven’t ironed themselves out this season.
Pete Carroll opined about the field’s lousy conditions earlier in the season; the Giants slipped all over the place just a little over a month ago in a game against the 49ers, once again leading to the swapping out of cleats during the game.
If you thought that things would be fixed by the time Alabama and Clemson meet on Monday night, you would be sorely mistaken. The grass currently looks more akin to a public golf course without irrigation than a legitimate professional stadium, with sand littered throughout the turf to fill divot holes in hopes the grass will magically grow back in the next 72 hours.
Player safety has taken the forefront in college football recently, with a greater emphasis on head injuries and a targeting penalty sorely in need of reform. That is, until the almighty dollar and the power brokers of college football come in, with revenue outweighing the player safety risks that come with unsafe turf conditions.
What happens if a key player gets injured on Monday night due to the conditions of the turf? A completely avoidable injury should not decide a game between the sport’s two preeminent programs.
Poor field conditions led the NFL to move a scheduled game between the Chiefs and Rams, the biggest game of the NFL regular season, from Mexico City to Los Angeles with player safety in mind. Why can’t college football do the same?
This furthers the need for a college football commissioner, someone who could step in and move this game from Santa Clara to a stadium more fan and player friendly. The trek is too far, the price tag too high, for the average fan to make the trip to Levi’s Stadium for the game.
If they moved the game somewhere like Atlanta or New Orleans, or even Indianapolis, tickets would be in demand similar to last season’s title game between Alabama and Georgia.
Instead, there’s likely to be empty seats for college football’s biggest game on Monday night, something that will be an embarrassing mark on the sport, and something that is unavoidable due to the lack of fan interest in the area.
And it’s not due to Alabama-Clemson fatigue. Levi’s Stadium fails to even fill a third of the seats for the PAC-12 Championship Game every year with teams more geographically friendly to the area. Locals surely aren’t coming out in droves to watch a pair of teams that they care nothing about.
The west coast deserves representation in the College Football Playoff to keep things balanced and fair. But that representation should come in the form of Los Angeles at the Rose Bowl or even Glendale, a couple of locales that are more desirable for fans that don’t present player-safety concerns, either.
Alabama and Clemson deserve better on Monday night, and so does college football.