The College Football Playoff has its championship game on Monday night with No. 3 Georgia playing No. 1 Alabama. The game begins at 8 p.m. Eastern on ESPN.
The College Football Playoff has its championship game on Monday night with No.3 Georgia playing No.1 Alabama. The game begins at 8 p.m. Eastern on ESPN. The four-team playoff format could stick around until at least 2026. One key matchup: Alabama’s offensive line against Georgia’s defensive front. A Georgia tight end could be a key to the game. How much will Alabama run? By Alan Blinder The most famous bulldog in Indianapolis these days is Butler Blue IV, the mascot at Butler University. But don’t tell that to the Georgia fans who idolize their bulldog mascot, Uga X, also known as Que. Wut up Dawg? Welcome to Indy. #CFBPlayoff| #GoDawgs pic.twitter.com/oUggaMgN0P Que is the latest star in a line of English bulldogs, owned by the Seiler family of Savannah, Ga., that have served as Georgia’s living, breathing athletic symbol since 1956. In his role since 2015, Que normally passes games at Sanford Stadium in Athens in an air-conditioned doghouse. The stadium, of course, has Uga lore beyond the hedges that line the field: Georgia buries its deceased canine mascots in marble vaults in Sanford. Butler also has a tradition of revering its bulldogs — we visited Blue IV in 2020, when he was training for his new gig, and it was quite the showcase — but it is unclear whether the canines settled the matter of most doted-on bulldog when they met in Indianapolis. By Billy Witz and Alan Blinder Hours before Monday night’s national championship game, the College Football Playoff’s expansion ambitions stalled when the sport’s leading power brokers proved unable to agree on a plan almost seven months after some of them publicly proposed a 12-team format. The playoff, which currently features four teams each season, could still grow in the coming years and inject hundreds of millions of dollars a year more into the richest conferences in college sports. But the addition of games as soon as the 2024 season is increasingly unlikely after months of turmoil, with the negotiations complicated at different moments by disputes over potential compositions of the playoff field, fears of protracted seasons and mistrust that flowed from a surprise round of conference membership shuffles. “Have you ever seen the movie ‘Groundhog Day’?” Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said after the meetings wrapped up on Monday. Although he did not slam the door on a resolution that would increase the size of the playoff before the current agreement’s expiration at the end of the 2025 season, Bowlsby suggested that the chances for a speedy agreement were vanishing. He signaled that at least some opponents to the 12-team proposal appeared intractable so far.
