Meet Atlanta, college football’s capital

For the entire 2017 season, one city’s been at the heart of it all. Georgia’s capital has hosted some of the sport’s biggest games this season, capped off with a Georgia-Alabama National Championship in the amazing, new Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

First, the city hosted No. 1 Alabama vs. Florida State, the biggest college football opener ever, despite FSU’s collapse afterward, and a Georgia Tech-Tennessee Labor Day thriller, both of which ranked among the 10 most-viewed games of the regular season.

Those were followed by the SEC Championship that served as a Playoff play-in game, the HBCU national championship in the season’s first bowl game, and the Peach Bowl that UCF is using as part of its national title claim.

“There’s no other city in America that [had] that number of high-ranked teams and big events over the last year,” Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl CEO Gary Stokan told SB Nation.

Atlanta is a unique sports town. It’s got two pro basketball teams with a little bit of history, a team that went to the Super Bowl just last year, a baseball team with a truly regional fanbase, and was an Olympic host city in 1996.

But because of history — the hub of the Southeast didn’t get its first major-league teams until the 1960s, decades after Georgia and Georgia Tech had claimed national titles in football — college football will always have a deeper foothold.

Add that to the city’s famous transience, with almost every ACC and SEC school counting Atlanta as its biggest alumni base, plus plenty of grads from the Big Ten and elsewhere. Drive around town on any given day, and you’ll see an Ohio State sticker, a Notre Dame license plate, and an Oklahoma flag. Spencer Hall captured it:

More so than any other city, Atlanta’s veins pulse with college football, often at the expense of other sports foolish enough to assume they can steal a significant chunk of attention away from the tribes of choice for Atlantans. The Falcons will always run second to Georgia, even in the Ray Goff-iest of years. The Hawks have become a basketball excuse to field a hard-working dance team. Thrashers fans, [your team left since this post was written].

This city’s sports soulmate is college football, and everything else amounts to a misbegotten and forgettable fling. It’s in the ubiquitous car window stickers, the assumption that fall weddings are verboten, and the empty meat and beer aisles at grocery stores on Saturday mornings. Walk through an in-town neighborhood this Saturday. There will be a hint of fall under the heat, and the sound of a television blaring out the sound of football, and the smell of someone cooking meat on a grill.

Since 2010, we’ve seen new or revived programs, including Georgia State, which had its first season in 2013 and opened its brand new football stadium by using the Braves’ old Turner Field. In the Metro, Kennesaw State started up in 2015 and made it to the playoffs this season. Elsewhere in the state, Mercer and Reinhardt have been revived from the 1920s and ‘30s, and DII Berry College founded a team, too.

Georgia is fourth in the country in the most blue-chip recruits produced from 2013-2018, pulling further away from typical peers Ohio and Louisiana and ranking closer to the Big Three states:

Usually, Georgia produces about twice as many blue-chippers as Ohio. This year’s 40-12 margin might never happen again. But the consistent stream of talent in the Peach State is the biggest reason Mark Richt was able to win so consistently in Athens. It’s also the biggest reason Kirby Smart’s in the Playoff in his second year.

As of September 2017, over 130 Georgia high school players were on NFL rosters. A few years ago, Georgia ranked fourth in NFL players, with Atlanta tied for second for metro areas.

The fact that the title game pairs two local teams only strengthens this part of the argument. UGA lists 90 Georgians on its roster, with Alabama adding 11.

Atlanta is home to the College Football Hall of Fame, which relocated from South Bend in 2010. The HOF has three levels of interactive entertainment that will delight any college football fan, casual or diehard. Here’s SB Nation’s Jason Kirk before the opening in 2014:

“It’s gotta be fun. It’s gotta be engaging. It can’t be just a hall of fame,” says John Stephenson, the College Football Hall of Fame’s CEO and our tour guide. “Most of the building is an attraction you can have fun in, even if you aren’t a college football fan.”

“The goal was to take everything people know about halls of fame and blow them up.”

The new College Football Hall of Fame is fully modern and seems even more so when compared to the halls in Canton, Springfield, or Cooperstown.

It’s got things like a wall of 768 current college football helmets that light up with your favorite team via a radio chip when you walk up, a rivalry corner, and factoids on college football legends throughout.

Starting in July, one of college football’s biggest media circuses, SEC Media Days, will move to the Hall of Fame, marking the first time since 1985 the event won’t be in Alabama.

“Atlanta is the epicenter of college football,” Atlanta Sports Council CEO Dan Corso told SB Nation. “So it’s kind of pretty easy to sell that sport in this city and this community. It’s the top of everybody’s mind.”

In 2015, the HOF generated $19.9 million in revenue. When taking into account the Peach Bowl semifinal last year between Alabama and Washington and combined with the games this season, Stokan estimates $50 million in tax revenue for the city.

“There’s a social buzz and a social impact that’s created in working with the College Football Playoff,” Corso said. “Over the last year, we’ve been able to provide the Atlanta public school system with $1 million to go back to their classrooms.”

“You can’t turn on a radio station that’s sports talk radio in this city — 365 days a year — without hearing about college football,” Stokan said. “You may not hear about the Braves, you may not hear about the Falcons, you may not hear about the Hawks 365 days a year, but you will hear about college football.”

Even in the dog days of summer or the slow news days in winter, there is a college football topic on at least one major Atlanta station, important or not.

That’s also the case in college towns like Norman, Columbus, and Knoxville and cities like Memphis and Birmingham (annually the city with the highest college football TV ratings), but what makes Atlanta the capital is its size, as arguably the only top-10 metro population truly obsessed with the sport above all others (you don’t exactly see Hummers parading through Chicago or Philadelphia with big-screen replays of college games on their tailgates), and its diversity of national fanbases.

That includes the state’s internationally influential hip-hop community. Gucci Mane and T.I. are Alabama fans, Quavo has become a Georgia sideline fixture, Big Boi’s become an Auburn fan thanks to his daughter (but still roots for the Dawgs and Jackets too), Pastor Troy and Bubba Sparxxx are longtime UGA fans, and so on.

Sports bars across the city treat college football Saturdays like NFL Sundays.

You bring up college football to any given person at a local watering hole around here, and you can bet they’ll holler about some aspect of their team. At 2 a.m. at a Waffle House one Friday night, I got in an argument with a friend’s friend about whether a particular SEC job tops a certain other one from the ACC. I had a friendly, heated discussion with one of my best guy friends about the Big Ten vs. the SEC at Big Sky in Buckhead.

“You can get on [Interstate] 285 in Atlanta on a Saturday, it looks like a NASCAR race with all the flags from the cars of different schools,” Stokan said. “People drive to Auburn and Alabama and Tennessee and Georgia and Mississippi, Mississippi State — it’s incredible.”