The Chick-fil-A Bowl will be played in its final iteration on Tuesday night when Texas A&M takes on Duke. Next year, the bowl will join the new college football playoff as one of a rotation of six games that will eventually decide the national champion.
The path to the confetti and spotlights from the mud and apathy which described some of the earlier versions of the Chick-fil-A Bowl — born the Peach Bowl — is paved by what Gary Stokan describes as the spirit of Atlanta.
“The community of Atlanta, through volunteerism, corporate support, local people buying tickets, that’s how we were able to achieve this,” said Stokan, the bowl’s president and CEO. “It’s a ‘Team Atlanta’ success story, not just the bowl.”
Stokan can point to several factors that reversed the bowl’s fortunes:
- Delta, later followed by Chick-fil-A, providing financial support;
- The pairing of an ACC vs. an SEC team;
- Moving the game to the Georgia Dome;
- Locking in the game with ESPN;
- The founding of the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game, which provides a marquee matchup to start the season;
- And finally, moving the College Football Hall of Fame from South Bend, Ind., to Atlanta.
George Crumbley founded the Peach Bowl, which was first played in 1968 at a rainy Grant Field. By 1985, the bowl was struggling. Just 22,000 tickets were sold for the Army-Illinois matchup in the mud of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
Dick Bestwick, who took over the game from Crumbley, went to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce to say that if the Atlanta business community didn’t step up, the Peach Bowl faced an bleak future. It had no title sponsor and no TV deal, two significant sources of revenue.
Delta CEO Ron Allen wrote a check for $100,000 on behalf of the airline and the Chamber took over the game in the late 1980s. More businesses, particularly hotels, stepped up to offer support, strengthening the game’s viability.
“When we looked at all the other cities hosting bowls, we thought Atlanta surely could host a good bowl,” said Allen, now the CEO of Aaron’s. “We took a critical look and said, yes, Atlanta should be able to support a bowl and the businesses and communities got behind it.”
The next important moves were all related: a new TV contract with ESPN (1991), officially pairing the ACC with the SEC (1992) and leaving open-air Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium for the weatherproof Georgia Dome in 1992.
The conference affiliation created more regional interest, the ESPN contract offered a broader national platform and the Georgia Dome allowed for bigger audiences.
Chick-fil-A became the game’s title sponsor in 1996, bringing a strong brand and regional recognition. In 1998, the contract with ESPN was renegotiated to include a provision giving the Chick-fil-A Bowl an unopposed New Year’s Eve time slot, providing it a national stage for football-hungry fans.
But the bowl still wanted a stronger matchup. Stokan went to the ACC in 2006 and negotiated moving up one spot in the selection process, guaranteeing his game would receive the first pick after the BCS selected its ACC team. The Chick-fil-A had been behind the BCS and then Gator Bowl before that decision. The Chick-fil-A usually landed a strong SEC team because of the depth of the conference.
At the same time, the team payout jumped from $4.8 million in 2005 to $5.65 million as a result of Chick-fil-A’s elevated sponsorship (Peach was dropped from the name of the bowl in 2006). The ESPN rights fee went from $1.3 million in 2005 to $2.5 million in 2006 to coincide with the improved matchup.
That image was further burnished by the 2008 founding of the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game, which pairs two marquee teams in one of the first games of the season. ESPN’s College GameDay appeared at the event three consecutive years, something Stokan said had never done.
The final step in cementing the game and its city as a major player in college football was securing the College Football Hall of Fame, which is under construction a few blocks from the Georgia Dome and is scheduled to open next fall.
“All of a sudden we weren’t just an Atlanta bowl, a regional bowl. We were thought of nationally,” Stokan said. “All of those things put together helped us to be perceived by commissioners that we should be thought of in the new college football playoff system.”
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