(This post was originally published on Trojans Wire.)
It would be great if we somehow managed to reach the College Football Playoff and the 2021 Sugar Bowl, which is one of the two scheduled semifinal games this season, the Rose Bowl being the other.
Obviously, merely getting the 2020 season off the ground will be enough of a feat at this point. This is where the energy and debate are (rightly) flowing in the world of college football.
There is nothing wrong with thinking ahead, however: The 2021 Sugar Bowl can’t be played in the Louisiana Superdome.
Indoor football shouldn’t be played — especially if there is any expectation that some fans will be allowed to attend.
The Superdome can hold just under 79,000 fans for football, so a 20-percent-capacity plan for a possible Sugar Bowl game in the big dome would allow around 15,000 fans into the building.
If you’re going to have 15,000 fans (around 16,000 people, total, if you include the other personnel needed to stage a College Football Playoff semifinal), you can’t have a game played inside a dome without a retractable roof. That’s what the Superdome is.
Either move the game to the campus of the higher-seeded team or — if playing the game in New Orleans is really important — move it to the Tulane University campus.
A crowd of 15,000 watching what could be a four-hour game with air recirculating in an indoor environment is not something we should recommend — certainly not until we have a proven vaccine ready to distribute.
Barring the highly unlikely outcome of a safe vaccine being ready to distribute at the end of 2020 — most reasonable projections would have April or maybe late March as the earliest possible time for that development — the Superdome shouldn’t host the Sugar Bowl.
The whole point of having the Superdome as a Sugar Bowl and playoff venue is to stuff 79,000 people inside the grand building and create a great atmosphere.
If we’re only going to allow a few thousand fans to attend a game, might as well put it outdoors and create conditions much less conducive to the spread of COVID-19… smack-dab in the middle of flu season.
It’s the right move, even if it might seem premature.