Sports council considers high stakes for Atlanta, teams

Given that, what is a Big Event Pooh-Bah to do?

Stokan, for 11 years atop the Sports Council, plays the college football card, that’s what. Because in the South, that sport never will let you down. It’s as dependable as grits and gravy.

Saturday night at the Georgia Dome, the nation’s No. 5- and No. 7-ranked teams — Alabama and Virginia Tech — meet here for the second Chick-fil-A Kickoff game. ESPN brings its “Game Day” hijinks to town. The atmosphere will be akin to a bowl game in September. And big ol’ cosmoplitan Atlanta gets to reinforce Stokan’s boast that it is “the heartbeat of college football.”

The idea of front-loading a big game at a neutral site is not Stokan’s. They did it for nearly 20 years in New Jersey until that Kickoff Classic faded away. But his riff on the idea has found a home in Atlanta, bringing with it an estimated $30 million economic impact next weekend.

“We need to celebrate the beginning of the year like we do the end of the year,” he declared. And for the second year, the game he helped create will play to a full Dome and an ABC prime time TV audience.

The stakes are high, beyond the payoff of a reported $1.9 million per team. Last year’s inaugural Chick-fil-A game — Alabama 34, Clemson 10 — set the tone for both teams. Renewed under Nick Saban, the Tide loved the result so much it wanted to come back. Clemson’s reaction was somewhat different — it fired coach Tommy Bowden just six games into the season.

According to Stokan’s vision, Atlanta should be the place where college football comes to celebrate the start of the season and good teams come to calibrate their ambition.

The Chick-fil-A Kickoff game plans to have LSU and North Carolina next season; and has a contract two years after that with Tennessee and North Carolina State. Looking even farther into the future, Stokan wants to draw upon such powerhouses as Notre Dame, USC or Texas.

“We’ve had those conversations to see if we can pull in another conference to match against either a SEC team or an ACC team,” he said.

Everyone out there is fair game to a big college fan with a bigger dome at his disposal. Stokan, after all, is the guy who wants to break Jacksonville’s monopoly on the Florida-Georgia game, bringing it here at least once every four years.

Meanwhile, it remains up to him to protect Atlanta’s place at the head of the line of cities wanting to usher in the college football season. He expects competition, as others note the success of Atlanta’s kickoff game. Dallas is getting in on the act this Saturday, when Oklahoma and BYU meet in the Cowboys’ new stadium.

ESPN’s vice president of programming, Dave Brown, says Atlanta is well positioned to hold onto the lead. “It has a great stadium, huge alumni bases; it’s a great recruiting area and it’s a place where fans want to go. That combination is hard to find,” he said.

Stokan, 54, is a one-time assistant basketball coach at his alma mater, N.C. State, who moved to Atlanta in 1980 to be a rep for the apparel company Adidas. He held various sports management positions before joining the Atlanta Sports Council in 1998.

He’s a former college point guard whose claim to fame is that his first practice pass was stolen by one of the great players in ACC history, David Thompson. It is evident he comes by his affection for college sport honestly.

Stokan is still swinging for the mega event. The Sports Council is working to get Atlanta included in the U.S. bid for either the 2018 or 2022 soccer World Cup, a longshot Stokan admitted. The PGA Championship returns in 2011, as does the men’s Final Four in 2013.

Getting that elusive Super Bowl back is going to take a little more work, given the NFL’s memory of the 2000 ice storm that froze up so many of the satellite events around the game.

“When we lost [the Super Bowl bid for] 2009, I said we were going to have to build a dome over the city,” Stokan joked. At least, he seemed to be joking.

Riding the whims of professional sport is just a part of Stokan’s job, but at least there is one constant upon which he can depend.

“We’re a college town,” said the man who shapes so much of Atlanta’s sports profile.