Sugar Bowl Postponed After Deadly Bourbon Street Attack

New Year’s in New Orleans is one of the biggest celebrations in America. New Orleans is already one of the most vibrant cities in the country, and when you add in a Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day with 80,000+ college football fans coming into town, it gets even bigger.

However, tragedy struck the celebration in New Orleans at the start of 2025 when a man drove a truck through the crowd on Bourbon Street in the early hours of Wednesday morning, killing at least 15 and injuring dozens more. The suspect was killed in a subsequent standoff with police, and the FBI is investigating it as a terrorist attack. That investigation is ongoing and has resulted in the FBI and police doing sweeps of Bourbon Street, the Caesars Superdome, and other highly-trafficked areas, looking to ensure the tragic events of Wednesday morning remained an isolated incident.

The ongoing investigation meant a decision needed to be made on Wednesday afternoon about how they would proceed with the Sugar Bowl, scheduled for Wednesday night at 7:45 p.m. local time between Notre Dame and Georgia. After initially planning on moving forward with the game as scheduled, Sugar Bowl officials met with law enforcement officials on Wednesday and determined the best course of action was to postpone the game, per ABC News. The current plan is to play the game on Thursday, with the game currently being pushed back 24 hours until Thursday.

District Attorney of Orleans Parish Jason Williams told ABC News that the game will be played on Thursday instead of Wednesday night.

“As of right now, it’s only being postponed one day,” Williams said.

As Laura Rutlege of ESPN reported on ABC News, Georgia’s football team has a shelter-in-place order at their hotel and the FBI did a sweep earlier in the day on the Superdome that came back clear to allow people back into the building.