‘The next best thing': Watching ACC and SEC football deep in enemy territory

But Lee and the other couple of hundred Gators fans taking over Miller’s are thrilled. Having moved from Orlando a few months ago with his wife and newborn son, he’s itching to get the season started and make new Atlanta friends -- particularly those who dress in orange and blue. And yet Atlanta, as it does for many SEC and ACC alumni who move here, seems strangely familiar, even if the Atlanta Gator Club’s motto is “Deep in Enemy Territory.”

“Orlando is so transient,” said Lee, who watched games at the franchise’s Orlando location. “Here in Atlanta, I don’t know if I’m in a different place or not, because I notice Gator [license] tags more often. It’s strange to me to be this close to Athens [home of the University of Georgia] and us Gators totally taking over a sports bar.

“It’s surreal.”

He’ll learn. Atlanta, after all, is the same city in which Braves fans have to endure the “Cowboy Up!” cheers of Boston Red Sox fans during baseball. As the largest metropolitan city in the Deep South and bordering four other Southern states, Atlanta has become a hub for more than just Delta Air Lines.

Atlanta’s also become a hub for college football excitement, where virtually every alumni chapter is the largest outside a given college’s state. And metro Atlanta’s sports bars and restaurants fight to capture their attention and allegiance.

“Although it’s obviously a great gathering place for Georgia Tech and UGA fans, Atlanta otherwise feels like a kind of massive neutral site for SEC and ACC alumni,” said Maggie Dixon, president of the top-ranked University of Alabama’s local group that takes over the spacious Hudson’s Grille in Midtown -- with its vast draft-beer tap selection -- on fall Saturdays.

“Atlanta is a great place to live and work. There is so much here for people. We call ourselves ‘Bama in Atlanta,’ and we say, “My home’s in Georgia, but my heart’s at Alabama.' ”

Some college football fans are so in need of a home away from home that they’ll open up their own restaurant to secure a safe game-viewing location. Or at least that’s what seemed to happen in 2002 when Gamecocks grad Randy McCray (University of South Carolina, Class of ’90, marketing) opened Carolyn’s Gourmet Café, named after his mother, on West Peachtree in Midtown. A former corporate exec, McCray teamed with Scott Kerns, an old college buddy with restaurant experience.

Together they developed a menu filled with upbeat-sounding sandwiches such as the Motivation (turkey and Swiss), Need to Succeed (roast beef) and Commitment to Excellence (BLT). Their positivity made Carolyn’s the place to be for Gamecocks on game day.

Even if it’s a Thursday, as about 200 hundred fans showed up for the season opener against Southern Mississippi. McCray and Kerns worked the bar area, greeting old friends as they took their seats under a ring of wall-mounted flat-screen TVs with one huge screen opposite the main bar.

McCray acknowledged it’s tough being a fan of the Gamecocks, who struggled for decades as a college football independent and even since joining the SEC in 1991. It makes having his own bar, for his fellow fans, that much more special. His waitresses sport garnet and black T-shirts, and the patrons follow suit.

Only now, they hope, after grabbing former Gator Steve Spurrier, can the Gamecocks emerge. This year they’re knocking on the door of the preseason Top-25 polls.

“It’s funny being a Gamecock fan,” McCrady said. “At the beginning of the year, our expectations are way up here (raising his hand), and there’s no reason to because we hadn’t done anything the year before, and sure enough, we get disappointed.”

Speaking of disappointment, Florida State’s fading glory in the final decade of the Bobby Bowden era forced fans to shrink from their favorite OTP spot, TJ’s Sports Bar and Grill on the edge of Roswell, and focus on the Mellow Mushroom location in Brookhaven. At TJ’s on this first Saturday, former head-coach-in-waiting Jimbo Fisher is trying to help FSU fans forget those final Bowden years by crushing Samford University.

It’s enough to bring out about 50 fans to TJ’s, including the father-son combination of Al Varner (Florida State, Class of ’72, engineering) and Devon Varner (Florida State, Class of ’02, computer science). The darkened main room is lined on the right side with the flat-screens, but its lengthwise shape leads the viewers toward the dominant screen in the back. Devon half-apologizes as he's about to dive into TJ’s massive Hugo’s Nachos.

Both father and son lament the Days of Bowden, are split on the decision to let him go (Al says it was time, Devon wanted one more year), but both are optimistic about the Fisher regime and don’t mind that TJ’s isn’t as packed as it used to be.

To Al, all that matters is, “It’s nice to go someplace other than home.”

Devon nodded his head and added, “It’s the next best thing to being in the stadium, and it’s only a few minutes to drive home.”