Downtown Atlanta figures to be crowded this weekend, with some 150,000 people expected to attend various events in advance of college football's national championship game.
Imagine the scene if another huge sports event had been added to the weekend mix downtown: a home playoff game for the Falcons.
“I never like to deal in hypotheticals, but I will say about that one: We would have worked it out,” College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock said when asked how the CFP would have dealt with such a scenario. “The stadium staff would have been under the gun to make the transformation of the look from Falcons to us, but it all would have happened.”
The Falcons didn’t earn home-field advantage, so they will be in Los Angeles to play the Rams in a Wild Card game Saturday. But if the Falcons had gotten a home playoff game for this weekend, they would have played Saturday or Sunday at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, surrounded by CFP ancillary events at the Georgia World Congress Center, Centennial Olympic Park and Philips Arena.
Georgia and Alabama will meet in Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Monday night for college football’s national championship.
If the Falcons had gained a home game this weekend, Hancock said the CFP would have hoped the NFL could schedule it for Saturday rather than Sunday but would have had no assurance.
“It would have been (the Falcons) working with the NFL to try to be assigned a Saturday game,” Hancock said. “But we know the NFL has a lot of balls in the air when they make those schedules, so we don’t know what would have happened.
“But it’s not something we have to worry about.”
This is the fourth season of the College Football Playoff, and the national title game has been played in an NFL stadium each season. But so far, the CFP has been lucky in that there hasn’t been an NFL playoff game in the stadium on the weekend preceding the Monday championship games in any of those years.
Events in advance of the Georgia-Alabama game this weekend will include an interactive fan festival inside the Congress Center, an open-to-the-public "media day" in Philips Arena and a concert series in Centennial Olympic Park. All of those venues, which are part of what the CFP calls its "Championship Campus," are within an easy walk of Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
