How Atlanta Became The College Football Capital Of America

Atlanta is the college football capital of the U.S. This was not so predictable 33 years ago. In fact, there was mourning over the college game locally. Atlanta was about to lose its bowl game, The Peach.

The city was one meeting away from punting the Peach to the curb because of a lack of support from big business and the community. And to think, by this Saturday night, the city will have hosted two national semifinals and national championship of the College Football Playoffs in four years and will host three Power 5 kickoff games the first week of the 2020 season with the title sponsor, Chick-fil-A.

Dick Bestwick, the former Virginia coach and head of the Peach Bowl, said the game was doomed after the Dec. 31, 1985 game where Army squeezed past Illinois on a rain soaked field at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

Jerry Bartels, the president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, who had said several months earlier that Atlanta could be a sports mecca, wouldn’t let the game vanish. He asked the chamber board of directors if the chamber could take over the game and rally support. He got a tepid ok, but he was also told, “You’ll be presiding over your own funeral.”

There was no death knell. Bartels went out and rallied the same corporations who had been lukewarm to the game. Ron Allen, the CEO of Delta Airlines, handed him a $100,000 check and then helped recruit more corporate support. Coca-Cola jumped in. The game started to gain momentum.

What was significant was the chamber did not operate under the thumb of politicians. There were no quid pro quos, so to speak, with favors being traded. It is a business group and was not going to be hijacked by petty quarrels. Bob Coggin, another Delta exec, started revving up local ticket sales. The game chugged along.

Then, 11 years later, came something even more significant. Chick-fil-A, a regional chicken sandwich company, became the title sponsor of Atlanta’s bowl game. A year later, Gary Stokan, a former marketing executive with Adidas, started putting some polish on the game.

Now, with 20 sellouts in 22 years, including Saturday’s CFP semifinal between Oklahoma and LSU, it is hard to believe the Peach Bowl went through a period of torment.

What vexed Atlanta 33 years ago___corporate buy-in___ is now a sure thing. NAPA, Home Depot, UPS, Delta, Mercedes-Benz, Chick-fil-A and many other local businesses have a stake in the college game. Stokan pushed it all along, including rallying Atlanta to pursue the College Football Hall of Fame, not the NASCAR Hall of Fame, as some had wanted.

“It stuns me that Gary doesn’t get more credit for what he’s done here helping to make Atlanta a host city for these events,” said Bob Hope, a former executive with the Atlanta Braves and now a public relations scion in the city. “While other people were interested in getting the Nascar Hall of Fame, Gary wanted the College Football Hall of Fame for Atlanta. That’s the kind of vision he had.”

As the president of the Atlanta Sports Council from 1998-2009, Stokan oversaw the city’s sports-as-tourism effort, which brought in events worth over $2 billion in economic impact.

In 2020, five of the top seven conventions in Atlanta will be football games.

Stokan turned down a lucrative offer to be the CEO of the Rose Bowl in 2009 because he had just signed a 30-year licensing agreement with the National Football Foundation to bring the College Football Hall of Fame to Atlanta. He allied the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference as post-season bowl rivals—the heart of the Chick-fil-A footprint— and those games have attracted sellout crowds.

Stokan said one of the keys to Atlanta becoming “the football capital of the U.S.” was Atlanta Falcons’ owner Arthur Blank pushing for a new stadium, the $1.5 billion colossus Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which opened in 2017. It wasn’t just the stadium that was able to attract big-time college games, it was the experience. Blank modernized the game experience in Atlanta with fans in club seats on ground level, eye-to-eye with players. Fans in the third level, usually the level of after-thoughts, have amenities usually associated with seats closer to the field. Prices have been slashed for concessions for the “average’ fan.

“If you built a Mount Rushmore of people who made Atlanta a city that hosts big sporting events, Arthur would be on it,” Stokan said.

On Mount Rushmore, of course, would be the Taxpayer because the NFL and Blank certainly didn’t build the stadium by themselves.

So why did local business come on board in such a big way? The obvious is that college football, already big in the 1980s, just grew its fandom with television deals and national sponsorships. It couldn’t be ignored here.

Stokan also said there is a fundamental key to every bowl game’s success and that is to develop partnerships, not sponsorships. In every meeting with Chick-fil-A, Stokan and his staff made clear the priority was to sell chicken sandwiches for its partner.

“It cannot be transactional,” Stokan said. “You have to understand their goals.”

Stokan also said that for every $1 million a partner/sponsor puts up for the game, there has to be a spend of 3-to-1.

“It will get you 10-to-1 return,” Stokan said. The game’s marketing through ESPN was so robust Chick-fil-A became a nationally recognized brand in California, even before it had restaurants there.

There are also some significant brick-and-mortar fundamentals to the success of the Peach Bowl. Dan Corso, the president of the Atlanta Sports Council, said there are 11,000 hotel rooms within walking distance of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Now add this: 80 percent of the U.S. population is within a two-hour direct flight of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest airport in the world. Three interstates converge in the city (20, 75, 85). The downtown sports site is also smack in the middle of the MARTA train grid.

“It’s all tied to our infrastructure downtown, we are a Championship City because we have a championship campus downtown, it’s all compact,” Corso said. “We’ve got a great organization set up to put on these events, we all work together. But we are not just recruiting events to generate economic impact, we’re recruiting events to make sure we are a great place to live, work, and play.”

Thirty-three years ago, in the rainy gloom of the 1985 Peach Bowl, it wasn’t anything you could predict.