The Road to Chattanooga has come to a dead end.
For 13 years, Finley Stadium was the home of the NCAA Division I Football Championship game. That run ended Friday when the NCAA announced that Frisco, Texas, will host the game starting next season.
The NCAA’s decision stunned the local officials who participated in Chattanooga’s presentation to the NCAA Division I Football Championship Committee in Indianapolis on Thursday.
“I’m totally shocked,” Greater Chattanooga Sports & Events Committee president Scott Smith said. “I’m upset and I essentially feel sick to my stomach, because I don’t know what else we could do.”
Finley Stadium executive director Merrill Eckstein, who helped bring the game to Chattanooga starting in 1995, said he was surprised for two reasons.
“One, all the indicators we got on the front end were that we were in good shape on it,” he said. “Two, the presentation went excellent.”
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga athletic director Rick Hart was very emotional following the announcement. As bad as he felt about losing the game, he said felt even worse for the people who have put so much work into the game since it came to Chattanooga.
“I’m disappointed and sad for those individuals in particular, and for the community as a whole,” Hart said.
Frisco — which is about 30 miles due north of Dallas — will host the next three games at Pizza Hut Park, home of FC Dallas of Major League Soccer. The 23,000-seat stadium opened in 2005. It’s primarily used for soccer but also hosts high school football games.
With a new host and a new 20-team format that will push the championship game into January, the FCS playoffs will look much different next season. The 2010 title game will be played on Jan. 7, 2011, the same night as the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
“There’s always something going on in Dallas-Fort Worth that any kind of event is going to have to compete with, so that did not deter us,” said Tom Burnett, commissioner of the Frisco-based Southland Conference, which will serve as the host institution.
Damani Leech, the NCAA director of football and baseball, said the game had a good 13 years in Chattanooga, but the Football Championship Committee felt the potential for growth was greater in Texas.
“I don’t think the takeaway should be that Chattanooga has failed in the eyes of the NCAA in any way,” Leech said. “As the committee looked at this, at the end of the day they just felt like Frisco was the right host to help grow the championship and enhance the experience for our student-athletes.”
In its bid to keep the game, Chattanooga offered the NCAA a financial guarantee of $300,000. Frisco Mayor Maher Maso wouldn’t disclose the financial details of the bid his group presented, but he said it was in the same ballpark as Chattanooga’s.
Smith said the Sports Committee might consider bidding for the game again but only if he felt the community demonstrated, through polling, that it wanted to bring it back.
Some question-and-answer time was available at the end of Chattanooga’s presentation Thursday, but not one question was asked by the committee members. Smith, Eckstein and others thought at the time that was a good thing, meaning they had covered all their bases, but they looked at it differently in hindsight.
Asked if he thought the committee had already made up its mind before the presentation, Hart replied, “I’ll let you decide what that means.”
“I would hesitate to read too much into that,” Leech said of the lack of questions.
Following the presentations, Leech said, the committee and NCAA staff “chewed on” the decision for several hours. Along with a desire to “enhance” the experience for the players, Leech said the NCAA felt Chattanooga’s local ticket sales had plateaued in recent years.
Here and goneChattanooga has successfully hosted numerous sporting events over the years, only to see them go elsewhere:NCAA Division I Football Championship gameSoutheastern Conference women’s basketball tournamentTSSAA Spring FlingTSSAA state wrestling tournament
Smith didn’t dispute that local sales have held steady around the 10,000 mark — a record 10,651 were sold locally for the 2009 game — but he said the point of hosting the game wasn’t to fill the 20,668-seat facility with Chattanoogans.
The game, Smith said, has “got to be bringing money into the economy through hotel rooms and restaurants,” and that only happens when fans from out of town attend. The title game’s economic impact in 2009 was $919,250, the lowest since Chattanooga began hosting the game.
Chattanooga and the Sports Committee have lost their share of big events over the years, including the TSSAA Spring Fling and the Southeastern Conference women’s basketball tournament.
“We probably should take that as a compliment,” Smith said, “that we take these events that nobody wants and grow them into something that a bunch of people want.”
Frisco wanted the championship game and now has it. Whether it can become the notable local event in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex that the game was in Chattanooga remains to be seen.
“It’s really easy to say you can do it better than they can,” Maso said, “but Chattanooga set the bar pretty high.”