Sites of upcoming College Football Playoff championship games:
2016: Glendale, Ariz.
2017: Tampa, Fla.
2018: Atlanta
2019: Santa Clara, Calif.
2020: New Orleans
(Note: The games are played in January of each year.)
Among the events committed to the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium:
College football national championship game: Jan. 8, 2018
NCAA men’s basketball Final Four: April 4-6, 2020
SEC Championship football games: annually in early December, from 2017 through 2026
(Note: Atlanta is in the process of bidding to host the 2019 or 2020 Super Bowl.)
College football’s national championship game is coming to Atlanta.
The marquee event will be played at Mercedes-Benz Stadium — the Falcons’ new home under construction downtown — in January 2018, College Football Playoff officials decided Wednesday.
The game, representing the first college football championship to be determined in the city, will cap the first season in the $1.4 billion stadium, slated to open in March 2017.
“It’s great to have a big worldwide event to really help us kick off the new stadium,” Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau President William Pate said.
Atlanta competed against Houston, Miami and Santa Clara, Calif., to host the event.
The playoff’s management committee chose Atlanta for the Jan. 8, 2018, game at a meeting in Rosemont, Ill., on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Atlanta bid group gathered privately at the Metro Chamber offices downtown to await the result of a 10-month bid process.
“We high-fived and hugged and celebrated as soon as we got the good news,” Atlanta Sports Council executive director Dan Corso said.
Atlanta’s bid calls for a local operating budget of $12.5 million to host the game, according to Corso and Pate, both of whom are members of the bid group. The money, they said, will come from a portion of the city’s hotel-motel tax that is designated for attracting major conventions and sporting events.
For that investment, Atlanta tourism officials expect the game to generate worldwide exposure and to bring 70,000-plus money-spending football fans to hotels, restaurants and other businesses. Bid organizers don’t have an estimate of the game’s projected impact on the metro Atlanta economy.
The College Football Playoff debuted last season with the championship game at the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium in Arlington, Texas, where officials projected an economic impact of about $300 million. Such projections tend to be hotly debated and often discounted by economists, however.
The game is the second national mega-event awarded to Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Late last year, the NCAA decided to play college basketball’s men’s Final Four there in 2020.
Atlanta also is preparing a bid to bring an even larger event to the stadium: the Super Bowl.
NFL owners will choose in May among Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans and Tampa as the 2019 and 2020 Super Bowl sites. Preliminary bids are due in mid-November. Atlanta’s preference is the February 2019 Super Bowl.
“We’re now 2-for-3 on the big events we hope to have to end the decade,” Pate said. “Now that we’ve got the college football title game in ‘18 and the Final Four in ‘20, we’ve just got to double down on getting the Super Bowl.”
The College Football Playoff also chose the sites of its 2019 and 2020 championship games Wednesday: Santa Clara and New Orleans, respectively. In all, nine cities pursued one or more of the three games up for bid. Atlanta submitted a bid only for the 2018 game.
Playoff executive director Bill Hancock said finances didn’t drive the decisions on sites.
“The budgets were roughly equivalent from all nine (bidders),” Hancock said. “Budgets, as it turned out at the end of this, were not a significant factor. We were blessed with cities that knew what to do and knew how to budget, and that’s part of the reason I say any of the nine could have hosted this event.
“Too bad we had only three spots available.”
Hancock said the playoff’s management committee, which includes 10 conference commissioners and Notre Dame’s athletic director, chose Atlanta for several reasons: “The opportunity to play in that brand new state-of-the-art stadium; the concise footprint of hotels and spaces for ancillary events (near) the stadium; and of course the excellent air service (to the city), which will be particularly important for 2018 because there’s only a week between the semifinal games and the championship game.”
In addition to the Sports Council and the ACVB, Atlanta’s bid group included representatives of the Falcons, the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl and Georgia Tech.
“We will do everything we can to take this championship game to the next level in 2018,” Falcons owner Arthur Blank said in a statement.
This season’s championship game will be played in Glendale, Ariz., and next season’s in Tampa.
Most of the tickets for the game are allocated for fans of the participating teams, sponsors and other purposes, Hancock said, but approximately 5,000 will be available for sale to the general public in a national random-selection process. Details haven’t been set on how that process will work or when it will begin for the Atlanta game.
“We can expect a lot of interest from local people in that random-selection process,” Hancock said. “I think there will be a lot of Atlanta folks entering that.”
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