LSU-Miami 2018 football opener moved to Sunday kickoff

BATON ROUGE – Miami and LSU, originally scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 1, 2018, will now be played on Sunday, Sept. 2, 2018, at 6:30 p.m. CT on ABC as part of ESPN’s networks five-day college football kickoff weekend showcase.

The game, which will be played in AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, will mark the third-consecutive year ABC has aired a prime-time game on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend.

The 2018 opener for the Hurricanes and Tigers will mark the first regular season meeting between the two schools since 1988 and just the third overall meeting since 1969. The Tigers beat Miami in the 2005 Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, the last meeting between the ACC and SEC schools. Overall, the schools have played 12 times, dating back to 1946, and the Tigers own a 9-3 advantage in those matchups.

The 2018 LSU-Miami game will mark the Tigers’ fourth appearance in AT&T Stadium in an nine-season period, but the first since 2013. LSU beat Texas A&M in the 2011 Cotton Bowl, 41-24, before opening the 2011 season with a 41-27 win over Oregon. In the 2013 season opener, LSU defeated TCU, 37-27.

The LSU-Miami contest will be the Tigers’ second regular-season game on a Sunday since at least 1908. The only other time LSU played a regular-season Sunday game in the 110-year period was 2002, when Virginia Tech posted a 26-8 win over the Tigers in the season opener in Blacksburg, Va.

ABC’s Kickoff Weekend Sunday Night Presentation has Been Record Setting Notre Dame and Texas played in ABC’s first college football kickoff weekend Sunday night presentation in 2016, with the two-overtime thriller generating a total live audience of 11,093,000 viewers – at the time, a kickoff weekend viewership record across all networks. This season, West Virginia vs. Virginia Tech — from Landover, Maryland — played in the second annual ABC special presentation, generating a total live audience of 4,737,000 viewers, the third most-watched college football game on broadcast TV during the season’s kickoff weekend.