Georgia eager for national broadcast of G-Day game

Athens — In an extreme example of college football’s popularity, Georgia’s spring intra-squad game will be nationally televised for the first time Saturday.

Long a rite of spring in Athens, but once watched by only the most rabid of nearby Bulldogs fans, the G-Day game will be available in the 98 million U.S. households that get ESPN.

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Brant Sanderlin/bsanderlin@ajc.com

Georgia coach Mark Richt started spring practice a week later than usual to accommodate ESPN for the broadcast of the G-Day game.

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The telecast is part of the evolution of spring football games from mundane scrimmages to marquee events. Alabama’s spring game has been attended by an average of 85,000 fans the past two years. Nebraska’s game drew 80,000 last spring, with scalpers reportedly getting almost $100 for $8 tickets. Florida’s game drew 61,000 last year and was televised by ESPN, inspiring this G-Day telecast.

“I will admit I was sitting there watching [Florida’s game] on TV, and the first thing I did was pick up the phone and call [a staffer] and say, ‘We got to get our spring game televised,’” Georgia athletics director Damon Evans said.

In part to accommodate ESPN’s schedule, Georgia coach Mark Richt started spring practice a week later than usual so the G-Day game — the culmination of spring ball — would be played on Saturday. Kickoff is 1 p.m. in Sanford Stadium.

Georgia won’t receive a rights fee for the telecast, which Evans sees as a branding and marketing tool.

“The exposure,” he said, “is the reward in and of itself.”

For Richt, the reward is that the telecast might reach a future recruit in some far-flung place.

“You just never know who’s going to watch the game and get excited about Georgia,” he said.

ESPN vice president of programming Dave Brown says spring games have drawn cable ratings as high as 0.7, or almost 700,000 households nationwide. But he says ESPN doesn’t focus on ratings for spring games, viewing them more as buildup toward regular-season telecasts.

“The biggest thing for us is we like any opportunity we can get to make college football more of a year-round sport,” Brown said.

Georgia’s game is the first of two that ESPN will carry this spring. The other is Alabama’s on April 18.

“We think this is a bigger franchise down the road,” Brown said. “We’d like to do more spring games — perhaps a series of them spread over a couple of weekends.”

ESPN looks for “intriguing situations” in deciding which games to show, Brown said.

The intrigue in this G-Day game, he said, is that the Bulldogs are in the process of replacing quarterback Matthew Stafford and tailback Knowshon Moreno.

“The other 11 SEC teams,” Brown said, “will probably tune in just to see how [quarterback] Joe Cox and [tailback] Caleb King are doing.”

Georgia’s players are of different mindsets over how to approach a nationally televised intra-squad game.

“We know it’s important, being on that big of a stage,” Cox said. “But we’re trying to look at it as another practice, hopefully one last good practice of spring.”

“For me, it’s going to be like a regular[-season] game day,” linebacker Rennie Curran said. “Go out there and execute, and show how hard our defense has been working. Show the nation the strides we have made.”

The nation — or at least that segment of it utterly consumed by college football in April — will be watching.