I Hate Neutral-Site College Football Games

I Hate Neutral-Site College Football Games

(A Grumpy Dawg’s missive)

Georgia just played Florida at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, a building that looks like a spaceship landed on the parking deck and decided to stay. I hate it. As a matter of fact, I hate neutral-site games – even the one Georgia and Florida play in the Gator Bowl (now at EverBank Stadium) in Jacksonville, Florida. I have been to Mercedes-Benz Stadium many times for playoff games and SEC championships, and I just don’t care for it. I much preferred the old Georgia Dome – which I didn’t much like either.

I know the “neutral” site in Jacksonville is a tradition. It has hosted Georgia-Florida ninety-threetimes. Yet I would prefer that the game be played on the two schools’ campuses. Most Georgia fans would agree, because the game is in Florida, and although the tickets are split between the two schools, it still feels like a home game for the Gators. And spare a thought for Oklahoma, which plays Texas every year in Texas, at the Cotton Bowl – a stadium I would charitably describe as a dump. Can’t they move it to Jerry’s World? Actually, never mind. I hate that place for college games, too.

When Jacksonville renovated its stadium in 1994, the series finally went home-and-home. Unfortunately for us, this happened to coincide with the Steve Spurrier era, when Florida was elite and Georgia was… let’s say “pedestrian.” In 1994, Florida won 52-14 in Gainesville. The next year, in Athens, Spurrier ran up the score again and won 52-17, saying, “Someone told us no one had ever scored 50 points here, so we wanted to do that.” Typical classy Spurrier. Still, I’d take home-and-home in a heartbeat. And I suspect Florida fans would want that too now that fortunes have been reversed in the Kirby Smart era, in which Georgia is 8-2 against the Gators.

I was hopeful that, with EverBank Stadium being renovated, the series could move back to campus. But money dictated otherwise. This year’s game was in Atlanta, and next year’s will be at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa which, to be fair, I actually like. I’ve been there for bowl games, and it has a pirate ship. Hard to argue with a pirate ship.  But I – a diehard Georgia fan – would rather the game be played in the Swamp at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville. And I say that as someone who has been personally baptized there with mystery beverages at one game and showered with creative vocabulary on the way out of another. That was back when I was on the faculty at the University of Tennessee and served on its athletics board – so technically, I was getting cursed for wearing the wrong shade of orange. Go Big Orange!

For decades, Georgia-Florida was known as “the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.” The schools have tried to discourage the nickname because of course students don’t drink (wink, wink). But the name actually referred to all the imbibing at the tailgates. Yes, there is tailgating before every game, but this may be the only one where the tailgating is split 50-50 between the two fan bases.

The fans have responded by refusing to call it anything but The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. This year’s Atlanta edition was officially the “Invesco QQQ Atlanta Gridiron Classic,” which someone pointed out sounds less like a football game and more like something your financial adviser wants you to rebalance into. Really rolls off the tongue. Nothing fires up a crowd like an exchange-traded fund. At least the TV announcer had the decency to call it “the World’s Largest IndoorCocktail Party.”

Bless his heart. I bet his bosses cringed so hard they pulled something.

Apart from Oklahoma-Texas, this is the only game played at the same neutral site every single year, though there are always a few one-off neutral-site games sprinkled around the schedule. This year, North Carolina played TCU in Dublin, Ireland, which made no sense at all and for reasons known only to the accountants. Equally stupid were NC State versus Virginia in Rio de Janeiro and Kansas versus Arizona in London. Give me a break. If I were a season ticket holder losing a home game because my AD was chasing a dollar (or a real, or a euro, or a pound), I would be furious. Even moving a game to an NFL stadium – like Baylor and Auburn playing in Atlanta in the awful MB Stadium – would upset me. I heard that an annual Georgia-Clemson game might be played at MB Stadium. RESIST!

Those NFL stadiums and neutral-site games just feel antiseptic. Maybe it is the absence of the rowdy student sections. Maybe it’s losing the little things like the alternating orange and white sections of a Tennessee game – and the checkerboard end zones. It all feels staged and somewhat contrived being off campus. Seeing “Georgia” in one end zone and “Florida” in the other just looks like the grounds crew was confused and decided to split the difference.

Nothing beats being on campus – not even an additional $8 million. But hey, I am not the AD or the president of a school trying to balance my books. I know they are tasked with keeping their programs solvent. So I blame the deep-pocketed boosters who let this happen. Which is why I’ve decided I want to be a sporadic billionaire. Why sporadic? Because I have no desire to be Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates full time. I have no need for a 1,000 foot yacht, seven homes and a private jet (although the jet would be nice). I’d only need to be rich long enough to outbid Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Tampa for the game. After all $8 million is just a rounding error to the uber rich. So I would endow funds into perpetuity so that the Georgia-Florida will be played on campus every year from now until the end of time. Then I’d happily go back to being a regular guy with a decent tailgate.

Go Dawgs!