The image is striking: Fans watching a college football game in the midst of a pandemic, wearing masks with a smidge of social distance between them on row after row of bleacher seats.
The photo is 102 years old.
The Georgia Tech alumni Twitter feed posted a black-and-white photo of the scene at Grant Field in 1918. Decades before tailgates, prime-time kickoffs and billions in program-supporting TV money, the ethos of the die-hard college football fan was not much different than today: Risks be damned, we’re going to the game.
And once fans are allowed back in stadiums, history has shown football could come back strong.
“That’s really what started the big boom of college football in the 1920s,” said Jeremy Swick, historian at the College Football Hall of Fame. “People were ready. They were back from war. They wanted to play football again. There weren’t as many restrictions about going out. You could enroll back in school pretty easily. You see a great level of talent come back into the atmosphere. There’s new money. It started to get to the roar of the Roaring ’20s, and that’s when you see the stadiums arm race. Who can build the biggest and baddest stadium?”