Indiana is playing Miami football in the CFP national championship game. Follow live updateshere.
The 2025 college football season will come to a close on Monday, Jan. 19, with No. 1 Indiana (15-0) playing No. 10 Miami (13-2) in the College Football Playoff national championship.
In a curious set of scheduling circumstances, the Hurricanes – who because of their lower seed will be the designated “away team” in the game – will actually have the opportunity to win the championship in Hard Rock Stadium, where they play their home games during the season.
The CFP in 2022 announced that the Miami Gardens, Florida, stadium would host the CFP Championship game for the second time. That season, first-year coach Mario Cristobal led the Hurricanes to a 5-7 record. Now, five years later, his team has earned the right to compete for a championship in their home stadium with wins over No. 7 Texas A&M, No. 2 Ohio State and No. 6 Mississippi.
But the 2025 Miami football team is hardly the first to play a home game with a national championship on the line – the Hurricanes have a history of finishing off title-winning seasons in front of their home crowd.
Three of the program’s first four national championships – in 1983, 1987 and 1991 – came after the Hurricanes won the Orange Bowl in the eponymously named stadium where they played home games.
Nor is Miami’s opportunity unique to the program. Indeed, several teams throughout college football history have had the chance to win a national championship in a geographically favorable location:
Since the beginning of the modern era of college football – when the Associated Press poll began awarding national championships in 1936 – several teams have competed for national championships in front of a favorable crowd.
However, there was no official championship game due to bowl tie-ins and the fact the AP and UPI/Coaches polls (the latter of which began in 1950) named their national champions at the end of the regular season. This rendered bowl games irrelevant – even those among the consensus best teams in the country – when determining national champions.
It wasn’t until the 1968 and 1974 seasons, respectively, that the AP and Coaches polls factored bowl games into who won the national championship. One notable exception came in 1944, when No. 1 Army and No. 2 Navy played in a de facto national championship game in Baltimore to end the season. The Black Knights won 23-7.
* Finished No. 2 in AP, Coaches polls behind Notre Dame
It wasn’t until the 1992 college football season that the sport’s highest decision-makers attempted to better schedule bowl season to pit the top two teams in the country. The Coalition only lasted from 1992-94, while its successor, the Bowl Alliance, lasted from 1995-97.
This era of college football saw two teams compete for national championships in their home state, including the 1994 Miami football team, which lost the title game to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl to end the season 10-2.
BCS era (1998-2013)
College football did not have an official national championship game until 1998, the beginning of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Under this model, the championship game rotated among the traditional New Year’s Day bowls – the Orange, Sugar, Rose and Fiesta – to host the national championship.
This led to several teams – most notably LSU – to play for the national championship in their home state.
* Note: rankings reflect BCS standings
CFP era (2014-present)
Finally, the CFP era, which began in 2014, has featured three games in which a team played for a national championship in their home state.
Georgia played Alabama in the 2018 CFP Championship game in Atlanta, just 73 miles west of the Bulldogs’ campus in Athens, Georgia. Two seasons later, LSU traveled 80 miles southeast to New Orleans to play in the 2020 CFP Championship game vs. Clemson.
Six years later, Miami has the chance to add yet another home-crowd victory in the CFP era.
* Note: rankings reflect CFP seeding