Is Charlotte too cold for ACC title game, bowl game?

Well, the first ACC football championship game in Charlotte didn't exactly get Chamber of Commerce weather.

Sleet pellets and even a few snow flurries fell around daybreak and again Saturday afternoon in the Charlotte area, and while the precipitation likely will be cold rain -- not the frozen stuff -- for tonight's kickoff, it certainly won't be attractive weather.

I realize some people believe football should be played in Green Bay-esque weather, but I suspect the majority would prefer temperatures at least in the 50s for a championship game, and for the bowl game played annually in Charlotte.

All this begs the question (which has been raised many times before): Is Charlotte too far north for an outdoor football championship game? And is it too far north for a bowl game?

We'll dismiss the bowl game question immediately.

When the NCAA can sanction bowl games in New York City (the new Pinstripe Bowl) and Washington (the EagleBank Bowl) -- and, for that matter, the bowl game in Boise -- it's silly to question holding such a game in Charlotte.

Our weather is roughly similar to several other places that host bowl games, including Nashville and Memphis. And besides, the worst snow I ever saw at a bowl game happened once in the early 1980s, when North Carolina played Texas in the Sun Bowl in El Paso. I think it was in 1982. It was a whiteout.

But the ACC title game is another matter, because it was played the first five years at Florida sites, where sleet and snow almost certainly won't be a problem.

I went back and checked Charlotte's weather for the last seven years on the first Saturday in December, and I found -- perhaps not surprisingly -- that it's wildly inconsistent. The evidence:

2009 (Dec. 5): High of 47, low of 28, with .05 of an inch of rain. That's pretty crummy weather.

2008 (Dec. 6): 42 and 31 degrees, with a trace of rain. Once again, bad weather.

2007 (Dec. 1): 62 and 47 degrees. Fantastic!

2006 (Dec. 2): 59 and 36 degrees. Once again, fantastic.

2005 (Dec. 3): 50 and 27 degrees, with .05 of an inch of rain. Mediocre, but good enough.

2004 (Dec. 4): 35 and 33 degrees, with .21 of an inch of precipitation, some of it as freezing rain. Uhhh ... I don't think so!

2003 (Dec. 6): 82 and 66 degrees. That set a record for the latest 80-degree day in Charlotte history. Obviously, few people would have complained.

So over the past seven years, the weather was mediocre or better four times, and not good on the other three years.

Supporters of the effort to bring the ACC championship game to Charlotte note that the average temperature in Jacksonville, site of several of the league's title games, is only a few degrees warmer than here. That's correct, and I recall bad weather in Florida at least once.

The average high and temperatures at this time of year in Charlotte are 57 and 37, which is fine for football.

So let's hope the weather is better next year, and chances are it will be. Besides, as long as fans show up, the ACC will be happy, no matter what the weather.