This college football season will begin big and finish bigger in Atlanta.
Saturday night at the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, No. 1 Alabama and No. 3 Florida State will play in a Chick-fil-A Kickoff game, the first opening-week matchup of top-three teams since the start of the Associated Press preseason poll in 1950. And Jan. 8 in the same stadium, the College Football Playoff championship game will be played, marking the first time the sport’s national title will be decided in Atlanta.
“It truly is a watershed year for college football in Atlanta,” Dennis Adamovich, CEO of the College Football Hall of Fame, said recently. “It’s all happening right here.”
That point was reiterated Friday when the Atlanta Football Host Committee, the local organizing group for the national title game, celebrated the start of the season with a lunch event at the Hall of Fame.
“Being the epicenter of college football, there’s always a strong buzz, atmosphere, excitement, for the season to start,” Atlanta Sports Council President Dan Corso said after the event. “But with what’s coming here this weekend, 1 vs. 3, it’s just extra special.”
Perhaps appropriately, given college football's standing in Atlanta, the Alabama-Florida State game will mark the national TV debut of the city's new $1.5 billion stadium, following two locally broadcast Falcons exhibition games.
“When we first started negotiating (the stadium deal), I remember documents that used to say, ‘Atlanta Falcons New Stadium Project,’” Falcons President and CEO Rich McKay recalled Friday. “And we eliminated ‘Atlanta Falcons,’ and it just became ‘New Stadium Project.’ That was done for this reason, for hosting big events like this.
“We’re going to have 75,000 people in our building, and it will be the first … full-fledged event. We’ll be on national TV. It’s good for Atlanta, and it’s good for the building.”
Between Saturday night and Jan. 8, four other college football games will be played in Mercedes-Benz Stadium: Georgia Tech vs. No. 25 Tennessee in a second Chick-fil-A Kickoff game Monday night, the SEC Championship game Dec. 2, the Celebration Bowl on Dec. 16 and the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl on Jan. 1.
The Peach Bowl and SEC Championship game have been played in Atlanta annually since 1968 and 1994, respectively. What elevates this season are the massiveness of the Alabama-FSU opener and the national title game.
“There is no doubt Atlanta is the college football capital this year,” said Gary Stokan, president and CEO of the Peach Bowl and Chick-fil-A Kickoff. “And I contend, when you add in the passionate fan bases and the corporate support for college football, no other city can match us any year.”
The Peach Bowl, entering its 50th season, provides a good measure of Atlanta’s ascension in the sport. Long a lower-tier bowl fighting for survival, the Peach now is a part of the national semifinal rotation, alongside such storied bowls as the Rose, Sugar, Orange and Cotton. And the Peach’s offshoot, the Chick-fil-A Kickoff, starts this season with a matchup branded the Greatest Opener of All Time, or G.O.A.T.
“To put all of that in perspective,” Stokan said, “what a distance we have come from where we started, when it was difficult to recruit teams to come to the old Peach Bowl and play outside in the weather-plagued atmosphere (at Grant Field and the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium).
“Going from 1968 to now … it’s a tough script to write.”
Alabama and Florida State are No. 1 and No. 2 in college football for wins since 2010 and have won five of the past eight national championships (four by Bama, one by FSU). The programs agreed in 2015 to meet in Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s first college game.
“We didn’t know then that they’d be ranked Nos. 1 and 3, but we thought they’d both be top 10,” Stokan said. “Better for us to be lucky than good, I guess.”
The game will be televised on ABC, beginning at 8 p.m. Much earlier in the day, ESPN’s iconic College GameDay program will kick off its 25th season of road shows by broadcasting live from International Plaza outside the stadium, 9 a.m. until noon. It’s the show’s 11th visit to Atlanta, the first since 2012.
The choice of Atlanta as the site for the show reflects the appeal of Alabama-FSU, as well as the tidy storyline of starting GameDay’s season in the city where the national championship will be determined four months later on ESPN.
"Starting in Atlanta and ending in Atlanta ... seriously, that's what I'm looking forward to," said ESPN college football reporter Maria Taylor, who grew up in Alpharetta.
About 10 College Football Playoff staffers, plus a similar number of outside contractors working for the CFP, will attend this weekend’s Kickoff games, scouting the stadium for the national title game.
“We feel very fortunate to be able to observe the two games here this weekend,” CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock said. “That’s a remarkable opportunity for game-management people like us to be able to poke around the concourses and the back stage and the press areas and the locker rooms.”
Stokan openly wonders, as others have, if both Alabama and FSU might be back here in January.
“These same two teams,” Stokan said, “could be playing in the same city, in the same stadium, against each other, for the national championship.”
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