Playing rivalry games in NFL stadiums is a sad — and sadly understandable — reality of college football today
The walk to Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium takes you past fraternity houses with couches in the yard, dorms with spray-painted bedsheets, academic buildings filled with knowledge-hungry students even on a football Saturday. (This is Georgia Tech, after all.) Sure, you’ll have to step lightly; the sidewalk is often cracked, beer cans are everywhere, and there are always random chicken wing bones to avoid. (This is Atlanta, after all.) But when you arrive at the century-plus-old concrete behemoth, you’re fully in the mood for some college football. And if it’s the last Saturday in November, you’re filled with Clean Old-Fashioned Hate.
The walk to Atlanta’s nearby Mercedes-Benz Stadium, by contrast, is wide and clean, thoughtfully designed and masterfully executed, over sidewalks pristine enough to eat chicken wings off of — not that you’ll see any. There’s a tastefully planned and regimented Tailgating Zone — sponsored by a certain Atlanta-based home improvements company, of course — and the entire experience is not unlike walking into a cathedral, almost overwhelming in its grandeur.
Next year, Mercedes-Benz will host “Clean Old-Fashioned Hate,” the annual Georgia-Georgia Tech rivalry game — the first time since 1912 that the Georgia Tech-hosted half of the rivalry won’t be played at Bobby Dodd. It’s the latest example of the increasing NFL-ization of college football — and, sadly, it’s also completely understandable, given the new financial realities of the college game. Playing a rivalry game in an NFL stadium will provide, in the words of Georgia Tech athletic director J Batt, “a transformative revenue lift” — and, in college football’s wild new world, tradition is a cupcake and revenue a behemoth.
True, old-timey stadiums, even retrofitted ones, aren’t as aesthetically pleasing as modern creations. Aluminum benches aren’t as welcoming to alumni butts as cushioned club chairs. The Saturday afternoon sun is a lot more tolerable in an air-conditioned monolith than a concrete grandstand. Parking is a nightmare, traffic is “Walking Dead”-level apocalyptic, and good luck trying to get a postgame bite to eat in a college town.
But so what? Spend one afternoon at a rivalry game — the Iron Bowl, The Game, the Egg Bowl, Clean Old-Fashioned Hate, any of a hundred others — and you’ll understand it on a primal level. The sun shines a little brighter, the popcorn and hot dogs taste a little better, and the band sounds so much better in a college stadium.
At a rivalry game, alumni can point to the area of the stadium where they were sitting when they were students. Current students can reunite with high school friends who chose the opposition. Friends, colleagues, clients all mingle in tents and tailgates before and after the game, and when everyone takes a side, everyone wins.
There’s no debating the fact that Mercedes-Benz is one of the finest stadiums in the world, and an exceptional environment for big-time football. It’s hosted one Super Bowl — the 2019 Patriots-over-Rams snoozer, but that’s not the stadium’s fault — and will host another in 2028. It’s the site of Alabama’s famous second-and-26 national title win over Georgia in 2018, and will host this season’s college football title game. Every year, MBS hosts the SEC championship, the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic and Peach Bowl, and at least one Georgia Tech home game, including this year’s Notre Dame matchup happening on Saturday.
All of those games are spectacular, often transcendent experiences. And none of them are rivalry games, steeped in glorious, messy, transcendent tradition.
Georgia and Georgia Tech have played for so long that there’s not a person on earth alive when this series started. Granted, the series hasn’t exactly been competitive lately — Georgia has won the last six and 12 of the last 14 — but rivalries aren’t just about on-field results. (Georgia Tech fans have a whole armload of coping jokes at the ready — “What does a Georgia grad call a Georgia Tech grad? ‘Boss’” is about the only one we can print.) The Kirby Smart era at Georgia has tilted the rivalry firmly eastward, in the direction of Athens.
That, in part, is behind Georgia Tech’s decision to move the game. AMB Sports Enterprises — Falcons owner Arthur Blank’s umbrella organization — will pay Georgia Tech $10 million to play just one installment of the rivalry game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Ten million for one game is a hell of a paycheck to move a game one mile south. You could count the number of athletic directors who would decline that deal on no hands.
In an open letter to Georgia Tech fans, Batt outlined the expenses facing Georgia Tech as it seeks to return to its national championship-level ways, starting with the financial realities of the impending House settlement over student-athlete compensation.
“To compete for championships at the highest level in the post-House era, athletics programs will need to make an additional financial investment of at least $20-22 million annually to participate in student-athlete revenue sharing at the maximum level, which is essential to compete with our peers,” Batt wrote. “While at the same time, we will receive about $1 million less in annual distributions from the ACC, which will go towards our share of the $3 billion in back damages.”
Suddenly, a $10 million check to play one single game now makes a whole lot more sense, financially if not historically. Whether you see revenue-sharing as long overdue or a betrayal of college football’s bedrock ethos isn’t the issue any longer; either way, the bill has come due.
In his letter to Yellow Jacket fans, Batt has committed to returning the 2027 Georgia game to Bobby Dodd — though not 2029, 2031 and beyond. Maybe that was an oversight, or maybe it was just a matter of keeping options open for future transformative revenue lifts. Nothing is off the table at this point in the college football universe.
The 2025 Georgia-Georgia Tech game will be another feisty one on the field, and pregame message boards, podcasts and sports talk radio will light up the same way. But when you start monetizing nostalgia and turning tradition into a commodity, something ineffable but essential is lost. “Sterile, Climate-Controlled Hate” just doesn’t feel right, does it?
