Peach Bowl CEO Gary Stokan on CFB Kickoff Games: Our Contingencies Have Contingencies
Duke opened last season with a loss to Alabama in Atlanta in the traditional lid-lifter to the college football season, the Chick fil-A Kickoff game.
This year, the organizers decided to challenge themselves and expand the Chick fil-A Kickoff to three games over the season’s first week-plus.
It turns out, planning the three games has been even more challenging than they expected.
“My staff thought I was nuts, scheduling three games in a week, which has never been done in college football history—151 years,” said Gary Stokan, the CEO and President of the Peach Bowl, the group tasked with organizing the Kickoff. “And then to have COVID-19 get on top of that, it’s led itself to some interesting work.”
Stokan spoke to Blue Devil Country about the challenge of planning the games in such an uncertain environment. Part one of the two-part conversation is in the video above.
With less than two months to go until the games are scheduled to be played, the future of the college football season is still up in the air, to say nothing of the Kickoff games. It’s led to the need for great flexibility by Stokan and his team.
“Our contingencies have contingencies,” he said. “We have modeled different scenarios, put in different protocols, deleted some things we ordinarily would do. So there’s a bunch of things—obviously, the tickets and the budget, there’s impact. There there’s impacts as to what the field will look like with respect to people on the field. 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.”
Assuming there will be some number of fans allowed in, there’s the question of protecting them, which will impact the budget as well
“There’s increased costs of potentially masks for everyone that attends the games,” he said. “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. Because we won’t be able to put on the Chick fil-A Kickoff games.”
Stokan hopes to have an answer by the end of July, when the ACC, SEC and Big 12 will announce their plans—conference only, full slate or something in between; on-time start or pushed back start. Then he can begin making decisions regarding the games.
In part 2 of our conversation, Stokan discusses the impact of a delayed start to the season on the Kickoff games and the conference’s appetite to go forward with the games. You can hear part two here.
