Northern college football fans have discussed with delight the opportunity for southern teams to travel to the Midwest or Northeast for a cold-weather game when it matters. Now, they get their wish with the 12-team College Football Playoff.
The tournament debuts this weekend with four contests on campuses, and that includes two games with southern schools traveling north. Dallas-based SMU flies to Penn State, which has a predicted high of 25 degrees on Saturday afternoon. For a Saturday night kickoff at Ohio State, Tennessee will experience a projected low of 14 degrees.
How the weather will impact those teams depends on your viewpoint. The Athletic college football writers Seth Emerson (SEC) and Scott Dochterman (Big Ten) tried to work together on a story, yet their views were so different the format changed. To better understand one another’s outlook — which largely mirrors people from their regions — they offered up contrasting back-and-forth segments.
‘Where’s our heat?’
Dochterman: On a pleasant mid-November Saturday in the Midwest and Southeast, ESPN’s Laura Rutledge’s sideline report in the second quarter of the Tennessee-Georgia game brought the weather discussion to the forefront.
“Well, Chris (Fowler), it’s a breezy 55 degrees down here, and on the benches for Tennessee, the heater on the wide receiver portion of the bench is not working,” Rutledge reported. “They’ve been really cold. They just gave them the heat from the running backs’ part.”
Incredulous, Fowler replied, “Come on, wait a minute, Laura, 55 degrees?”
“I’m telling you it’s chilly,” Rutledge said. “These receivers have been asking for heat. And now the running backs are going to come back after this drive and say, ‘Where’s our heat?’”
“Who needs heat at 55?” Kirk Herbstreit asked.
If Tennessee’s receivers vacated a non-heated bench on a 55-degree night, what are they going to do Saturday night at Ohio State?
I’ve witnessed the misery of southern football players dealing with freezing weather firsthand. With winds howling from the southeast at 12 mph and real-feel temperatures dipping to the high single digits in November 2020, Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck called a timeout with 19 seconds left to prevent a shutout against Iowa.
Fleck’s counterpart Kirk Ferentz chose pettiness despite the cold and called three consecutive timeouts to extend the game by about five minutes. Concurrently, Iowa running back Tyler Goodson — a Suwanee, Ga., native — shivered on the sideline. Now a running back with the Indianapolis Colts, Goodson said, “The heated benches in the cold saved me.”
Goodson was outstanding that night with 142 yards and two touchdowns, but he struggled to cope with the brisk environment when he wasn’t carrying the football. For an entire roster like Tennessee or SMU acclimating themselves to temperatures 40 degrees cooler than what previously required heated benches, color me both intrigued and skeptical.
It gets cold in Tennessee and Texas, too
Emerson: That Tennessee story sounds damning. It’s also overblown: The heated benches were out for only five minutes, and people around the Volunteers were surprised such a big deal was made out of it.
Also, it does get cold in Tennessee. That’s hill country. There seems a perception up north that every day down here is warm air, palm trees and Mai Tais. The truth is that unless you live below a certain part of Florida you’re well-acquainted with the cold. Not as cold as our friends up north. But a solid enough winter. There’s a reason snowbirds flock to Fort Lauderdale, not Macon or Birmingham.
Is the SEC a bunch of overrated wimps who refuse to play in real football weather? This is one of those tropes that Southerners see as an excuse from their Midwestern brethren. But could there be something to it? FCS and Division II teams from the South have been doing this for years, going north in their playoffs or late in the regular season, so I called up a couple of coaches.
Seven years ago, Kennesaw (Ga.) State flew into the biggest November snowstorm that Bozeman, Mont., had seen in years. When the team landed at the airport, naturally the players started a snowball fight.
“You’re going to let them do that?” the school president asked then-coach Brian Bohanon.
“Why not?” Bohanon answered. “Half of them have never seen snow.”
By kickoff the next day, the snow was barely cleared from Montana State’s field, but it was still 20 degrees. Despite the elements, Kennesaw State eked out a 16-14 win, clinching a spot in the FCS playoffs.
“Probably one of the best wins we had there, at the time,” Bohanon told me.
Chris Hatcher, now the coach at Samford, remembered a regular-season game at Delta State (Miss.) when he was at Valdosta State (Ga.) in the early 2000s, where it was so cold that he and his staff, which included youngsters Will Muschamp and Kirby Smart, just decided to call run plays so they could get home.
A couple of years later, Valdosta State was playing in the Division II national championship in Muscle Shoals, Ala., where it was still very cold, and they lost to Grand Valley State, then coached by Brian Kelly. One could argue Grand Valley State had the advantage because it’s from Michigan, but Hatcher says that wasn’t the case.
“I don’t think the cold mattered that day, because it was the national championship,” Hatcher said.
That was where Hatcher and Bohanon landed: The more the game matters, adrenaline takes over and the cold doesn’t matter.
“At the end of the day the team just has to be ready to play. And if you’re really dialed in and focused, it shouldn’t be a deciding factor,” Bohanon said. “Is it a factor? Yes. Is it the factor? No. That team we took to Montana State and won, they didn’t care. They just wanted to play. But those things can be a factor if you allow them.”
And the players most susceptible to it being a factor, both coaches agreed, tend to be from South Florida. Hatcher recalled a game Samford played at East Tennessee State in 2016, when it was extremely cold.
“We had a couple guys from the south Florida area who did not play real well, and the conditions really bothered them,” Hatcher said. “I think it’s probably a little more individual-based.”
‘They’re not used to this weather’
Dochterman: Southern teams can overcome wintry conditions and win games on northern campuses. But there is a difference between living in an environment where 30-degree highs with wind are commonplace and locations where that temperature dips that low once a week.
Northern players live in the cold, so dealing with it is second nature. Southern teams must conquer that element while they compete against a northern squad. Although there are examples of southern teams performing well in the North, remember it took the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers 26 years to win a game with a temperature below 40 degrees. Often, winter matchups turn out like last week’s FCS quarterfinal between Incarnate Word and South Dakota State.
Incarnate Word’s football team departed from its San Antonio campus a day early last week to acclimate to an unforgiving environment awaiting them in Brookings, S.D. The Cardinals traded temperatures in the mid-60s for a 17-degree wind chill at kickoff. That was the warmest day of the week for the Jackrabbits, who practiced outside.
During the game, Incarnate Word quarterback Zach Calzada wore long sleeves; South Dakota State counterpart Mark Gronowski lathered his exposed arms in Vaseline. The two-time defending champion Jackrabbits embraced the elements and won, 55-14.
“All throughout practice we had to take this cold as an advantage, especially with a team from Texas,” South Dakota State cornerback Dalys Beanum said after the game. “They’re not used to this weather. We just knew that even though it’s cold weather outside, it’s Brookings, S.D., it’s December football. It’s what it’s going to be, and we just decided to embrace that.”
The Penn State and Ohio State squads will take on similar mindsets this weekend. In State College, located in mountainous central Pennsylvania, the average high temperature on Dec. 21 over the past decade is 37 degrees. This Saturday, the predicted high is 27 with northwest winds at 15 mph. That’s a wind chill of about 15 degrees. In Columbus, the day-time high is 30 degrees, which is right balmy the weekend before Christmas.
At both games, teams will have heated benches, but only one side panicked previously when they weren’t working. When Tennessee’s heaters began to work once again, Fowler said, “Thank goodness you can call off the frostbite alert on a 55-degree night.”
Added rules expert Bill LeMonnier: “If we were officials in the Big Ten, we’d be wearing short sleeves.”
It’s true.
It’s all in the preparation
Emerson: Tennessee folks will argue they did not “panic” over a five-minute issue with the seat heaters. Maybe they’ll ask SEC commissioner Greg Sankey to have a quick talk with ESPN about that one.
Last week in Knoxville, the low was 17 one night and 19 two other nights. Tennessee has been practicing at 9 a.m. last week and 10 a.m. this week, rather than the warmest part of the day in late afternoon.
❄️ @Vol_Football pic.twitter.com/EbDJSAK2Ve
— Max Gilbert (@maxgilbs7) December 11, 2024
Let’s repeat it again for everyone to hear: Knoxville, and the South in general, is not Miami.
But let’s still say it was. It’s not just the feel that’s the issue, as Bohanon pointed out: “The differences are the ball is hard, the ground can be frozen, the footing can be very different. If you’re on grass or turf, there’s a difference in that. Your hands get dry. A lot of kids wear gloves. If you’re a quarterback, especially gripping or feeling the ball is always something that comes into play, because it’s dry. Your footing, depending on the surface, can have an impact from what you’re used to.”
Now here’s the thing: Tennessee, like any good SEC program, knows all this. It has quality control people who are preparing the players for this. And it’s gone through this in practices and occasional games too.
SMU may not be as ready, given the average low in Dallas is the 40s. But if the Mustangs can keep it close, it goes back to what the coaches said: Adrenaline has a way of warming the body up.
It’s great that this is happening: NFL games in the snow, or at least where it’s so cold you see everyone’s breath, are great. Three games this weekend in cold weather is wonderful; the only regret is only two of them feature a southern team as the visitor.
If only there were more opportunities to shut you Yankees up. (Personal note: The writer is from Maryland and his wife is from Michigan, so he knows all about bad weather and thinks that bolsters his position.)
Bring on the cold
As you can tell, neither reporter will budge on the weather issue when comparing teams from northern and southern climates. Should the northern teams prevail, the weather trope will embed itself into every discussion about the CFP’s future. If southern teams play well and advance, it breaks the stereotype and provides confidence for other teams to do the same in future years.
Either way, Playoff games on campus — North and South — are here to stay. And we’re here for it.
(Top photo: David Dermer / Diamond Images / Getty Images)
