Playoff Fans in the Cold as College Football Plots Its Future
The New York Times
Recent huddles among the sport’s leaders have shown how much television drives their thinking.
INDIANAPOLIS — Freezing rain had turned the downtown sidewalks here into granite-hard slip-and-slide tracks. A downtown concert stage and beer garden sat vacant, a dance and light drone show was canceled, and getting a restaurant table — even a socially distant one — was no problem at all on Saturday night.
It seemed that Georgia and Alabama football fans, many of whom had driven from Atlanta and Birmingham to avoid exorbitant airline fares and to squirrel away money for tickets to Monday’s national championship game, had decided after driving through ice storms that it was wiser to stay in their hotel rooms and order in. (And why not, when a room at the TownePlace Suites was going for north of $900?)
The weather was dry by Sunday, but temperatures plummeted into the teens.