Why Alabama’s bowl game will be the Peach Bowl Playoff semifinal in Atlanta

No. 1 Alabama will be the top seed in the College Football Playoff. That was already close to certain, and it became everything but official as the Tide smashed Florida, 54-16, in the SEC Championship.

They’re 13-0 heading into the sport’s four-team main event, the only undefeated power-conference team, and they look as much like a juggernaut as ever.

The Playoff field’s formal announcement is at noon ET Sunday on ESPN. But there’s no drama about where Alabama’s heading.

The Tide will play in the Peach Bowl Playoff semifinal on New Year’s Eve. That’ll happen at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, the same place where they just beat Florida. We know this because of the Playoff selection committee’s protocol for assigning teams.

It reads, in part (bolding mine):

When assigning teams to sites, the committee will place the top two seeds at the most advantageous sites, weighing criteria such as convenience of travel for its fans, home-crowd advantage or disadvantage and general familiarity with the host city and its stadium. Preference will go to the No. 1 seed.

The other Playoff semifinal this year is the Fiesta Bowl, in Glendale, Ariz., also on New Year’s Eve.

The No. 2 seed could be Clemson or Ohio State, who both are also closer to Atlanta than to Arizona. But as the top team, Alabama gets dibs, so the Tide will have their semifinal just a three- or four-hour drive from Tuscaloosa. That beats a cross-country flight into the desert, where the No. 2 and No. 3 seeds will be heading.

In recent years, Alabama’s had a lot of success in neutral-site games. The Tide have now won five of those in a row, with their last loss coming against Ohio State in the 2014 season’s Playoff. They’ve gotten comfortable at the Georgia Dome, too, having beaten Florida there in each of the last two seasons and having won season-openers there.

Against Florida in this year’s SEC Championship, Alabama scored on a blocked punt and an interception return in the second quarter. The two scores marked 14 non-offensive touchdowns for the Crimson Tide this season, and then Bama’s offense showed up, too.

Now, they’ll get to play in Atlanta again. It’s not Bryant-Denny Stadium, but the Georgia Dome nonetheless should make for a de facto Alabama home game. That’s pretty bad news for whoever winds up on the other sideline, which we’ll find out Sunday.

The two New Year’s Eve Playoff semifinals are at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. ET. Because the Fiesta Bowl is on the West Coast, it would make sense that the Peach Bowl get the earlier time slot. But that’s not guaranteed, and the committee and ESPN could opt to have a noon local time Fiesta and nighttime Peach Bowl instead.