![]() “If they pushed back, would they start with conference games or the nonconference games? We just don’t know. “We don’t know what the conferences are going to do,” Stokan said. That means they may not actually be kickoff games anymore but rather mid- or late-season contests. They’ll just need to fit into the schedules of the other Mercedes-Benz Stadium tenants. Should that happen, Stokan envisions the Chick-fil-A games taking place. There’s also the possibility that the conferences decide to push the start of the season into October or later. Because we won’t be able to put on the Chick-fil-A Kickoff games.” “So there’s a myriad of things and all with the hope that in late July, the Big 12, ACC and SEC decide to play more than just conference games, because if they decide to just play conference games, then all that work is for naught. “There’s increased costs of potentially masks for everyone that attends the games,” he said. Kickoff is less than two months away and virtually nothing is decided, including whether this has all been a wasted effort. Will we have cheerleaders? Will we allow bands? How will people enter the stadium? We’ve modeled different capacities of 25, 30 and 50 percent, which has trickle-down ramifications to the budget and then the payout.” Then there’s impacts as to what the field will look like with respect to people on the field. So there’s a bunch of things - obviously, the tickets and the budget, there’s impact. “We have modeled different scenarios, put in different protocols, deleted some things we ordinarily would do. “Our contingencies have contingencies,” he said. As Stokan said, the conferences will let everyone, including him, know their plans for the upcoming season in a week or two, which will obviously have a major impact on the marquee interconference matchups he’s planning. “And then to have COVID-19 get on top of that, it’s led itself to some interesting work.” “My staff thought I was nuts scheduling three games in a week, which has never been done in college football history - 151 years,” Stokan, a former basketball walk-on at NC State, said. Unfortunately for Stokan and his staff trying to plan the events, they chose to push themselves in a year when the coronavirus has scrambled all attempts to plan anything. For the first time, there are three Chick-fil-A Kickoff games scheduled. This year, however, Stokan decided to bite off a little bit more. Duke and Alabama played in one of them at the start of last season. Normally, Chick-fil-A sponsors a pair of games in Atlanta to kick off the college football season. “We’re the proverbial tail on the dog,” Stokan said, “but the tail’s not wagging the dog - we’re not wagging anything here. 1 bowl game, Stokan is in charge of the Chick-fil-A Kickoff games, which, like the Peach Bowl, are held annually in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. One of the people hanging on that decision is Gary Stokan, the CEO and president of the Peach Bowl. That decision will have an impact across athletics - and across the college landscape - since most schools depend heavily on the revenue generated by football to fund the rest of their athletics department. The ACC, SEC and Big 12 are still playing wait-and-see, however, with a final decision expected at some point this month. Some smaller conferences have already pushed their seasons to the spring, if at all, and the Big Ten and Pac-12 have already said they’ll be playing only their conference schedules. The COVID-19 pandemic has put the return of college football this fall into question. Gary Stokan, Peach Bowl president and CEO, is trying to plan three Chick-fil-A Kickoff games for the first time, all with the uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.
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