No. 3 Clemson will face No. 23 Virginia Tech on Saturday evening in the 2016 ACC Championship. Saturday’s game will kickoff at 8 p.m. ET from Camping World Stadium in Orlando, Fla., which marks the first time the city has hosted the ACC’s title game.
Why the 2016 ACC Championship is in Orlando instead of Charlotte
The game was moved from Charlotte in September because of a North Carolina law.
Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel)
Playing the championship game here wasn’t originally planned. In late September, the ACC announced it would be moving nine collegiate championships from North Carolina, including the football title game. The moves stemmed from a controversial state law in North Carolina.
In March, North Carolina passed House Bill 2, which makes it legal for workplaces and public accommodations to discriminate against transgender and LGBTQ people. It also requires transgender people to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on the gender listed on their birth certificates, even if it doesn’t represent their gender identity.
This wasn’t the first sporting event to move from the state.
It cost Charlotte an NBA All-Star Game, and earned scorn from a wide range of the sports world, as well as places far beyond sports.
On Sept. 12, the NCAA announced that it would be moving seven championships that were originally scheduled to be played in North Carolina, which impacted baseball, basketball, golf, soccer, and tennis. Football wasn’t included in those, partly because the NCAA has little to do with postseason events inside the FBS.
Just a couple of days later, the ACC followed in the NCAA’s footsteps, and announced that its conference championship games would be moved from its host city since 2010.
As members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, the ACC Council of Presidents reaffirmed our collective commitment to uphold the values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination. Every one of our 15 universities is strongly committed to these values and therefore, we will continue to host ACC Championships at campus sites. We believe North Carolina House Bill 2 is inconsistent with these values, and as a result, we will relocate all neutral site championships for the 2016-2017 academic year. All locations will be announced in the future from the conference office.
Other cities that were reportedly considered were Jacksonville and Tampa, its host cities before 2009.
Those sites appeared to be tricky, thanks to the Jaguars’ and Buccaneers’ home schedules.
Part of the reason for the move to Orlando was likely the ACC’s existing relationship with Camping World Stadium. The venue (otherwise known as as the Citrus Bowl, to all you Floridians) has been a friend of the ACC for years. The Russell Athletic Bowl has been in Orlando since 2001, and that game has included an ACC team each year since 1995.
Camping World Stadium also recently underwent a major $208 million renovation, which completely upgraded the facility. The renovations made it much more functional and gave it a new look that’s much more aesthetically pleasing.
At the start of the 2016 season, the inaugural Camping World Kickoff Classic featured the ACC’s Florida State in a comeback win over Ole Miss, with a Seminole-heavy crowd. The opening weekend game already had set deals to host ACC teams in the future, with Alabama-Louisville in 2018 and Florida-Miami in 2019.
The other reason is just the city of Orlando in general.
Yes, I was born and raised in the city. But it doesn’t hurt that Orlando has popular theme parks and nearby beaches that make its games more attractive to fans experiencing winter conditions elsewhere in ACC country.
It’s also a pretty big opportunity for the city in light of the shooting at a gay nightclub that devastated the community last June. Here’s SB Nation’s Steven Godfrey on that aspect.
This could be a chance for the ACC and college football to recognize a LGBTQ community it’s all but ignored for decades. Charlotte lost the game months after North Carolina’s legislature passed the HB2 bill, which legalized discrimination against LGBTQ people and mandated transgender people use public facilities per their birth sex. Orlando is the site of a June 12 mass shooting that killed 49 people and wounded 53 at a gay nightclub.
To some in college football, those are two isolated incidents. For some others, the location is impossible to ignore.
Originally, Florida’s state high school football championships were scheduled for Dec. 2-3 and Dec. 9-10 from Camping World Stadium.
The Florida High School Athletic Association first said in a statement prior to the move that the decision to move the games at the ACCCG’s expense would “require a written agreement by both the Central Florida Sports Commission and the FHSAA.”
Shortly after the ACC’s official announcement of the move to Orlando, the FHSAA announced that all the state championships would be played the weekend of Dec. 9-10 from Camping World, as opposed to splitting the class championships up over two separate weekends.
What’s next?
In North Carolina, the governor behind the discriminatory bill is still attempting to contest the results of this year’s election, which he trails.
The ACC hasn’t announced a move for 2017 or beyond. The conference had planned to have the game in Charlotte through 2019.
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