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Tribune News Service
Tribune News Service
Sport
Joe Giglio

ACC football championship will be played in Orlando

The ACC is bringing its football championship game back to Florida.

The conference announced on Thursday the ACC title game will be played in Orlando, Fla., at Camping World Stadium on Dec. 3.

The game will kick off at either 7:45 p.m. or 8 p.m. depending whether it is televised by ESPN or ABC.

The game was originally scheduled to be played in Charlotte, N.C., where it has been the past six years, but the conference decided two weeks ago to move it out of the state in response to North Carolina's House Bill 2 law.

The law, which Gov. Pat McCrory signed last March, limits anti-discriminatory protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

A more publicized part of the law stipulates which bathrooms transgender people can use. On state property, the law mandates that people use the bathroom for the gender specified on their birth certificate.

The first five years of the ACC championship game were played in the state of Florida. Jacksonville hosted the game from 2005-07 and Tampa had it for the 2008 and '09 seasons.

The conference thought it had found a home in Charlotte's Bank of America Stadium, staging the game there from 2010 through last year's matchup between Clemson and North Carolina, but made the decision on Sept. 14 to move all of its neutral-site championship games out of the state. The move came two days after the NCAA pulled its championships out of the state because of HB2.

The ACC has an existing relationship with the Florida Citrus Sports group, which will run the conference championship game. FCSports runs the Citrus Bowl and Russell Athletic Bowl and the ACC has a deal with both games.

Florida State also held its spring game at the stadium, formerly known as the Citrus Bowl. The stadium underwent a $208 million renovation in 2015. The Seminoles opened their season there in the Camping World Kickoff with a win over Ole Miss.

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