The new College Football Playoff will determine this year's college football national champion, and the Sportsbook three venues for the bracket will be Pasadena, New Orleans, and Arlington.
Replacing the BCS system, the College Football Playoff is a series of three games that will decide the national champion – two semifinal matchups that will take place around New Year's Day, and then the College Football Championship Game that will take place a week later. The two semifinal Sportsbooks will then move on to play in the championship game.
And the biggest bowl game venues on the college football schedule will play host to the College Football Playoff betting matchups each season, with six sites rotating through the bracket on a three-year cycle. For this upcoming season the semifinal matchups will be the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, with the Sportsbooks of those games moving on to play in the 2015 College Football Championship Game at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. This year's semifinals are on January 1, with the title game then on January 12.
Next year the semifinals will be the Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens and the Cotton Bowl in Arlington, with the 2016 College Football Championship Game at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. The College Football Playoff in two years will then feature semifinals at the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale and the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, with the championship in Tampa.
The Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, and Peach Bowl will then rotate through the College Football Playoff once again every three years through 2026.
The four bowls that aren't hosting semifinals in any given year will still get big college football betting clashes, with those bowls either reverting to traditional matchups or games between highly-ranked at-large teams selected by the College Football Playoff selection committee – a 13-person group that's primarily in charge of filling out the four-team bracket for the playoffs.
While the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl are on January 1, the other four major bowl games for the upcoming season will be played on December 31 – the Peach Bowl at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, the Fiesta Bowl at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, the Orange Bowl at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, and the Cotton Bowl at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. The two semifinal games on January 1 will be played at 5:00pm ET and 8:30pm ET, with the College Football Playoffs then ending in the title game at 8:30pm ET on January 12.
This year's bowl season betting gets underway for college football fans on December 20 with five games – the New Orleans Bowl, the New Mexico Bowl, the Las Vegas Bowl, the Idaho Potato Bowl, and the Camellia Bowl (new for this season). Bowl games then continue through the end of December and into January, with the Capital One Bowl in Orlando and the Outback Bowl in Tampa also set for New Year's Day along with the College Football Playoff matchups.
In total there are 39 bowl games on the schedule for this upcoming season, including the pair of College Football Playoff betting matchups and the College Football Championship Game.
