PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - The first championship game in the College Football Playoff will be held at Cowboys Stadium.
The BCS conference commissioners announced Wednesday that Arlington, Texas, edged Tampa, Fla., in the bidding to be the site of the first title game in the new playoff system.
"The stadium itself was the biggest determiner," BCS executive director Bill Hancock said about the $1.2 billion dollar, state-of-the-art home of the NFL's Cowboys and the Cotton Bowl. "It's still the stadium with a capital "T.'"
The game will be held Jan. 12, 2015.
The final three sites for the semifinal rotation also were announced and Cowboys Stadium came up a winner again. The Cotton Bowl will be part of the six-bowl rotation, along with the Chick-fil-A Bowl in Atlanta and the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz. The Holiday Bowl in San Diego also bid for a spot in the semifinal rotation, but couldn't pull the upset.
The Rose, Orange and Sugar bowls are already part of the semifinal rotation. The Rose and Sugar will host the first semifinals Jan. 1, 2015,
The next season, the Cotton and Orange bowls will host the semifinals on New Year's Eve. The semis will be played in the Fiesta and Chick-fil-A bowls after the 2016 season.
For the Cotton Bowl and its organizers, landing a spot in the rotation and the first title game is the culmination of a long slow return to prominence for a game with a rich history.
The game dates to 1937 and has hosted some of the most memorable matchups in college football, including Notre Dame's comeback victory led by Joe Montana against Houston in the 1979 game.
But when the Bowl Championship Series was implemented in 1998, the Cotton Bowl was left out. Organizers for years tried to break into the BCS, but couldn't overcome the limitations of their namesake stadium in Dallas.
Things turned for the Cotton Bowl when it moved out of the old stadium at the fairgrounds in 2010 and into Cowboys Stadium.
Cotton Bowl organizers again started to push for inclusion in the BCS. The game was moved to primetime, and with its Southeastern Conference-Big 12 matchup, had all the trimmings of a BCS event, even without its stamp of approval.
When the conference commissioners announced last year the BCS would be abandoned for a four-team playoff starting in 2014, with the championship game bid out like a Super Bowl, it was all but assumed the Cotton Bowl would be part of the new system and Cowboys Stadium would be a strong candidate to eventually host a championship game.
They didn't have to wait long to accomplish both goals.
The Cotton Bowl will host a major bowl in the first season of the new format, likely on New Year's Eve. It will host a national semifinal in one of the following two seasons.
Tampa made a strong push for the first championship game to be played at Raymond James Stadium, home of the NFL's Buccaneers and the Outback Bowl. But Cowboys owner Jerry Jones' football palace was too much to overcome.
As for filling out the rest of the rotation, the sites that got the nod were no surprise.
Now that sites are locked in, the only major remaining issue to tackle for the commissioners is the composition and structure of the selection committee, which will pick the teams that play for the national championship.