Keep the Game Where It Belongs: Why Georgia and Clemson Fans Should Reject a Neutral-Site Money Grab

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An open letter from the fans who actually show up

The announcement hit like a bad snap on fourth and one: Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks has confirmed that he and Clemson AD Graham Neff “are in talks” to convert the scheduled 2029 and 2030 home-and-home series between the Bulldogs and the Tigers into neutral-site games, with Atlanta, Charlotte, and Dallas floated as possible venues. The reasoning, stripped of all its polished athletic department language, is straightforward: money. Revenue. NIL dollars. The cold arithmetic of maximizing every dime from a marquee non-conference matchup.

Here’s what the administrators in their Ritz-Carlton meeting rooms seem to have forgotten: the fans are the ones who make this rivalry worth anything in the first place. And from the perspective of anyone who has ever bled red and black in Athens or orange and purple in Clemson, this decision (if it goes through) would be yet another profound betrayal of what college football is supposed to be.

Death Valley Is Not a Rental Property

Let’s start in Clemson, South Carolina, because what is being casually bargained away there deserves to be said plainly: Memorial Stadium, “Death Valley” is one of the most sacred venues in all of American sport. Perched on the edge of a hill in a small university town, Clemson becomes something like the center of the college football universe on game days.

I am cynical about most college football stadiums. I’ve been to many of the cathedrals of the sport, and frankly I have found most of them wanting. Williams-Brice is a parking lot with turf in the middle. Jordan-Hare is barely fair, and the flight of the war eagle is the most overhyped 14 seconds in all of college football. Neyland Stadium is the best argument for high powered explosives and multi-millio. Dollar construction bond campaigns that was ever formulated. Starkville is Milledgeville without the charm or history.

But Clemson, and this pains me greatly to admit, is worth a visit. The tradition of running down the Hill, with players touching Howard’s Rock before sprinting into the roar of a capacity crowd, is a worthwhile experience. It is a living inheritance passed from one generation of Tiger fans to the next. When a team like Georgia comes to Death Valley, that tradition gains new weight. The visiting team runs down that hill into something. The home crowd is the game. Georgia has not played in Clemson since 2013 (a 38-35 Tiger victory). That is more than a decade of a rivalry between schools situated only about 70 miles apart. Conducting that reunion in impersonal NFL arenas that belong to neither school feels like a travesty.

Clemson fans deserve to host Georgia at Memorial Stadium. They deserve to give their children the experience of watching the Bulldogs walk into Death Valley as the crowd reaches a decibel level that the NFL has genuinely never matched. When you move that game to a corporate sponsor’s stadium in Dallas or Charlotte, you do not merely change the address. You remove the soul from the event entirely. Death Valley becomes just another stadium on the map rather than the most intimidating venue in college football.

They Paved the Hedges and Put Up a Parking Lot

In Athens, the argument is no less powerful. Sanford Stadium is a venue of such distinctive character that it has become synonymous with the Georgia Bulldogs themselves. The phrase “Between the Hedges” is not merely a slogan. It is a geographic and spiritual claim.

Clemson has not played a game in Athens since 2014. Apropos of nothing, it went great. But I digress. That means an entire generation of Georgia students has never watched Clemson come into Sanford Stadium and face what every visiting team faces: 92,000 of the most raucous fans college football has to offer. You cannot manufacture that in a neutral venue. You cannot pack the hedges into a shipping container and reassemble them at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. You cannot recreate the particular electricity of a crowd that is defending its home.

There is a reason that the home teams won both times the last home-and-home was played — Georgia at Sanford in 2014, Clemson at Memorial Stadium in 2013. Homefield advantage is real, earned, and meaningful. When you strip it from both teams by playing in a neutral city, you are not creating a fairer game. You are creating a lesser one.

The Hollow Logic of the “Better Atmosphere” Argument

Proponents of neutral-site games often argue that playing in a larger stadium, an NFL venue in a major metro area, create a better atmosphere and more excitement. This argument collapses immediately on examination.

Consider what actually happens at a neutral-site game. Each school receives a ticket allotment. Fans make travel plans and book hotels at inflated rates in cities like Dallas or Charlotte that have no organic connection whatsoever to either program.

The student sections are thin or absent entirely, and the students who make up the beating heart of any college football atmosphere simply cannot afford to travel. Corporate sponsors fill boxes. Season-ticket holders who live near campus , the retired alumni, the multi-generational families who have held those seats for decades, often find themselves priced out or geographically excluded. The local color that makes Athens and Clemson Athens and Clemson is completely gone.

What you get in exchange is a sanitized, premium-priced event that resembles a college football game the way a theme park resembles a real city. It looks sort of right. The scoreboard works. The concessions are fine, if uniformly overpriced. But something essential is missing, and every genuine fan knows it. The 2024 game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta drew attention and television ratings, but ask any fan who was there whether they would have rather been on campus, and the answer will tell you everything you need to know.

Fans Are Not ATM Machines

The financial argument deserves to be addressed directly, because it is the only argument the administrators are actually making. Neutral-site games generate more revenue. The site fees from a stadium operator, the added sponsorship opportunities, the larger footprint of a major-market game — it all adds up. Josh Brooks pointed to the financial success of the annual Florida game, played on a neutral site in Jacksonville, as a model.

But the Florida-Georgia game is a special and irreplaceable case, a game so embedded in regional culture that Jacksonville’s “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” has its own mythology stretching back nearly a century. It was never supposed to be a home-and-home. Clemson and Georgia, by contrast, agreed in what somehow feels like simpler times to play a home-and-home specifically because both fan bases were hungry to reclaim the on-campus experience.

But now your experience is a revenue stream, not a priority. The money will flow regardless. But the trust, once broken, is considerably harder to replace.

What Gets Lost Cannot Be Recovered

There is a generational dimension to this decision that rarely makes it into the athletic board meetings, but it is perhaps the most important one. College football rivalries are transmitted family to family, not broadcast to broadcast. A grandparent who took their child to Death Valley in the 1980s to watch Dooley’s Dawgs try to survive the Tiger roar is connected, through memory and story, to the grandson who should be sitting in that same stadium in 2029. That continuity is the living tissue of a rivalry. I just don’t know that you build those memories by traveling to Nashville or New Orleans to play in a bland NFL venue surrounded by a city that couldn’t care less what’s going on inside.

When you move those games to NFL venues in cities that don’t care about either school, you interrupt that transmission. You replace a chapter in a family story with a sponsored content moment. You tell the next generation that the place doesn’t matter, only the product does.

This is not a minor scheduling adjustment. It is a statement about what college football is for and about.

The Answer Is No

Georgia fans want Clemson on their turf, in their stadium, under their lights, with 93,033 Bulldog voices bearing down on the visiting team. Clemson fans want Georgia in Death Valley, running toward Howard’s Rock’s legacy and into the wall of sound that has made that stadium legendary. Both fan bases agreed to this. Both fan bases have been waiting for it.

The administrators should honor that. The game is not really theirs to sell. It belongs to the fans who have shown up, generation after generation, in the places where it was meant to be played.

Keep it Between the Hedges. Keep it in Death Valley. Keep the money out of it.

Go ‘Dawgs!!!

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