Clemson football: Moving UGA game from Charlotte could be considered

Moving the Clemson football home opener location could be considered

The Clemson football team is set to open up the 2021 season in a neutral-site matchup against the Georgia Bulldogs the first Saturday, Sept. 4.

The game is scheduled to take place in Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, NC, but there’s no doubt that both schools will be considering all of their options if the venue doesn’t make sense later this fall.

Of course, we’re talking about fan attendance.

We’re not qualified nor do we want to talk about the pandemic here, so we’re going to keep it strictly to football. Both Clemson and Georgia want to make the most money possible on this matchup and that means they’re going to want to have the most fan attendance possibly that can be done safely.

There is growing optimism that we could see full stadiums (or at least close-to-full) this coming fall with vaccine deployment, but that all still remains up in the air.

Still, Clemson SI’s Brad Senkiw brought up an interesting point: If Charlotte can’t accommodate more fans, should the Tigers and Bulldogs look to move the game elsewhere?

Clemson football needs to explore all options to make this as great of of a fan experience as possible

The first thought from Senkiw on where they could move the game?

"The first thought is still Atlanta, which is hosting Alabama-Miami on Sept. 4 and Louisville-Ole Miss on Labor Day. Sunday, however, would be a logical move, but both schools have to agree to play on an off-day that has just Notre Dame-Florida State scheduled."

The two teams could move their game to Atlanta- which is basically right in the geographic middle of the two schools- and play on Sunday to not interfere with the currently scheduled games between Alabama & Miami on Saturday, and Louisville & Ole Miss on Monday.

If Charlotte doesn’t seem like a smart option- and let’s be honest, if you can only have 5,000 fans in the stadium, it won’t make sense- Atlanta might be one of the first places the two schools look toward.

In addition, we could see the two go down to Florida and play a neutral-site game somewhere like Jacksonville. UGA fans might not be too happy about that because they’re already making one trip to Jacksonville when they play Florida, but it’s still an option that could accommodate the two fan bases.

Last, we could just see either Clemson or Georgia host the game. While neither team would want to give up a valuable home game, the trade off would be in the future. Perhaps we see the future series of home-and-home games switched to a school hosting two-in-a-row. Maybe the two schools add another game in the distant future to make up for the road trip that one school would have to make this season.

An extremely unconventional idea (that’s totally not going to happen) would be moving the game to a NASCAR track. Could you imagine Clemson and Georgia matching up on, say, Darlington Raceway? You could play the game at Atlanta Motor Speedway- which would be able to still space out and accommodate a ton of fans in the stadium.

The most likely option is that the game is played in Charlotte as regularly-scheduled, but if it becomes more prevalent that it can be played elsewhere with more fans in attendance, no one on either side would blame the Tigers and Bulldogs from at least exploring their options.