As College Football Championship Finally Hits L.A., So Do The Parties

Just as happened when the NFL’s Super Bowl finally came to Los Angeles last February after many years away, the College Football Championship arrived in town this weekend, both big games attracted by that sparkling new $5 billion palace to football known as SoFi Stadium.

Along the way, both championship weekends also fueled an array of festivities beyond the games, extending the experience for fans, convening notables from across the sport, and giving visitors even more to do in the nation’s second-largest city.

ESPN, which is televising Monday night’s matchup between the defending champ University of Georgia and Texas Christian University, did its part with a blowout party Saturday night in downtown Los Angeles, featuring a performance by Grammy-nominated singer/producer Mike Posner (I Took A Pill In Ibiza).

The party took a bit to get going, thanks in part to a related concert by the Jonas Brothers, held 5 miles away at the Banc of California Stadium near the University of Southern California campus and the Los Angeles Coliseum.

But once it got going, the party jammed well past midnight. Hundreds of attendees stuffed multiple levels of The Majestic, a 30,000-sq.-ft. event space with Italianate architectural touches like a marble central staircase, into a nightclub/library.

The walls were covered with bookshelves (though the books were more Reader’s Digest and John Grisham novels than academic treatises). Bar menus mimicked the fairy tale book being read in this season’s feel-good ESPN college football commercials, Once Upon a Game.

Among the attendees were former Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, a string of ESPN and SEC Network on-air personalities including former Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron, and a phalanx of online influencers, many of them former athletes.

But the party, as in previous years in other cities, also was a convening spot where notables from across the fractured and vast world of major college football could reconnect and socialize. I chatted, for instance, with the athletic directors (and their wives) from both North Carolina State University and Kansas State University.

I also talked with top executives from El Paso, Texax’ Sun Bowl, er, now clunkily called the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl. Regardless of the name change, the Sun Bowl remains one of the biggest and longest-running post-season games on ESPN’s enfilade of bowl matchups that fill programming from mid-December to early January.

There were executives with companies that provide travel arrangements for all the sports teams at universities around the country, and Learfield, which provides multimedia marketing services for both schools playing Monday night and dozens of others trying to reach brands and fans.

And befitting a sponsor-driven business (and party; heavy sports advertiser AllstateALL
was its sponsor too), people from plenty of big corporations connected to the game were there to celebrate together too.

The walls of the event featured scads of photos of big games and players from the season, particularly Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett IV and TCU quarterback Max Duggan, both finalists for this year’s Heisman Trophy. Also on display was another trophy, for the national championship, set up so people could be photographed next to it.

Up on the second floor, a special bar run by Cali Craft Cocktails was torching bits of pecan, cherry and mesquite wood, or using activated-charcoal sprays to create smoky versions of classic drinks such as the Old Fashioned.

Less surprising drinks included the rolling coolers behind downstairs bars emblazoned with yet another big sponsor, the soft drink Dr. Pepper. Executives with an Atlanta-based tire distributor (most of them big Georgia fans) scored tickets to the party and game; it didn’t hurt, they said, that their company sells billions of dollars worth of tires for part-owner GoodyearGT
, whose blimp flies over so many games.

The party and previous Jonas Bros. concert were hardly the championship weekend’s only festivities. A 5K fundraising road race and a fan-fest experience called Playoff Fan Central both took place at the nearby Los Angeles Convention Center, along with a Media Day for the two teams’ players on Saturday morning.

A food event called Taste of the Championship took place Sunday night at Hudson Loft, a couple of blocks from the convention center. And Allstate is also sponsoring a tailgate party on game night in two of the SoFi parking lots, though threatening rain forecasts may douse those plans.

Then, like those rain clouds, once the game is done, everyone will blow out of town, and on to next season.