A 62-year wait will come to an end Friday night when Georgia Tech plays Louisville at Bobby Dodd Stadium. It will be the Yellow Jackets' first Friday night game in the enduring coliseum since 1958.
In that time, plenty has changed, and a few things have not. For instance, the influence of television. Tech and Louisville will encroach on the night traditionally reserved for high-school football at the behest of ESPN, the monolith that doles out hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the ACC.
In 1958, though, it was Tech’s desire to avoid television competition that likely helped drive its decision to try playing on a Friday night. Tech officials chose to move its home opener against Florida State to Friday, Sept. 26, for several reasons, according to a column written at the time in the Atlanta Constitution.
“And the fact that Tennessee and Auburn are scuffling on TV the next afternoon undoubtedly figured in the final decision,” Constitution sports editor Jesse Outlar wrote.
The year 1958 was, in so many ways, a different time. Black students would not be admitted to Tech for three more years. The football team would not be integrated until 1970. And, as the Tech-FSU game approached, the nation’s attention was directed to Little Rock, Ark., where Gov. Orval Faubus had closed the city’s public high schools to prevent Black students from attending them, a year after the Little Rock Nine had integrated Central High against widespread protest from pro-segregation groups.
Also, the Pentagon asserted that manned spacecraft may have to launch from the North or South Pole to avoid lethal doses of radioactivity that astronauts would encounter from any other launch site. And a dermatology publication warned that ponytails may cause baldness.
Regarding football and television, the options were limited. Typically, one game was broadcast on Saturdays, but not always. Thus, the airing of a matchup of regional interest likely held the possibility of luring fans to stay home. Decades later, college sports administrators share a familiar lament – that the number of televised games and the quality of the broadcasts, while generating the revenue so needed to fuel their programs, have served to suppress attendance.
Tech was different in the following regard, as well. Grant Field routinely sold out, and in 1958, Tech expanded capacity from 40,000 to 44,726. Before the arrival of the Falcons, Braves and Hawks, and with coach Bobby Dodd’s Jackets having put together a 31-game unbeaten streak earlier in the decade, Tech tickets were not easy to come by, particularly those in the west stands.
“People want to sit there not only because of the view, but because it’s the thing to do,” Outlar wrote.
It is something of an ironic twist that the game that Tech officials decided to move to Friday, perhaps in hopes of goosing ticket sales, was against Florida State. A long time from becoming a national powerhouse under coach Bobby Bowden, the Seminoles had been playing since only 1947 after the Florida State College for Women became a coeducational school.
“Let’s not delude ourselves,” FSU coach Tom Nugent was quoted as saying in the Constitution. “We’ll be moving into another league when we play Georgia Tech next week.”
Nugent was proved accurate. Tech won 17-3, though the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat applauded the Seminoles for leading the game for “eight wonderful minutes.”
The game drew 40,391, one of two non-sellouts that season out of six games. The Friday-night experiment proved only that. The Jackets played a handful of Friday games over the years after that, but never, until this week, at home.
Under former coach Paul Johnson, Tech requested not to have any Friday night home games out of deference to high-school teams. When he was athletic director from 1980-97, Homer Rice said he never considered playing on Friday nights, a policy that he instituted when he was athletic director at North Carolina.
“Because that was for the high schools,” he said this week. “That was their night, and we didn’t want to interfere with that.”
Rice did, however, put Tech in position to help pioneer a different night for college football – Thursday. The Jackets played Virginia on WTBS in 1983 on a Thursday night and faced the Cavaliers again at Bobby Dodd Stadium in 1991, ESPN’s first year of its Thursday night series. With the backdrop of Atlanta’s skyline and Tech’s willingness to play on Thursday nights, Tech has been a frequent participant Thursday-night games on ESPN ever since.
The ACC has had Friday-night games as part of its ESPN package since 2013. Tech played its first in 2018, a 66-31 rout of Louisville. Not including Notre Dame, every ACC team except Clemson and N.C. State has taken its turn in hosting a Friday home game.
After the original schedule release in January, ESPN approached Tech about the possibility of moving its Sept. 19 game against Central Florida up one day to Friday, Sept. 18. Coach Geoff Collins consulted with state high-school coaches to get their feedback. When they gave Collins their support, Tech went ahead and accepted the request.
When the schedule was revised in August, the ACC gave Tech another Friday-night game, this one against Louisville. Most likely, television’s demands likely mean another 62 years won’t pass before it happens again.
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