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College football returns to the Aviva today. Laszlo Geczo/INPHO

College Football Classic: Big business, colour, and a hugely popular Kerryman

The Aviva Stadium is sold out for today’s meeting of Georgia Tech and Florida State.

OVER 25,000 AMERICANS and at least one Kerryman have crossed the Atlantic for today’s Aer Lingus College Football Classic at the Aviva Stadium.

But David Shanahan won’t be the latest in a proud line of Kingdom natives to make a cameo appearance on the periphery of a major American sporting event wearing his county jersey. He’ll instead don the uniform of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, the university football team for whom he is a fourth-year punter.

Castleisland native Shanahan grew up playing Gaelic football and rugby. He was a member of the Kerry U17 panel who won Munster in 2017 but was overage when Minor switched to U17 a season later. Shanahan, though, had found himself at an impasse in any case.

“There wasn’t a lot of adventure there, I thought,” Shanahan said. “Because I’d say, ‘Alright, best-case scenario, I’ll just grow up and play for Kerry and never really leave my hometown,’ or whatever. That’s something that didn’t really excite me that much.”

Shanahan was an ardent viewer of college football in the States. He preferred it to the NFL due to its more feverish crowds and identified with its athletes more due to his own age.

He noticed a trend: several of the punters in NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) football were non-American. They had instead progressed through the the ProKick Australia kicking academy, which is run by former NFL free agent Nathan Chapman.

Shanahan took a figurative punt and contacted ProKick. By chance, one of their coaches was in Manchester and flew over to watch him kick a ball. Soon afterwards in 2019, Shanahan was on a flight to Melbourne in an effort to become an American football player.

A year later, he became the first Irish-born, Irish-raised athlete to earn a football scholarship to a Division 1 university in the States. In 2021, after a year delay due to Covid, he lined out for the first time for the Georgia Tech Yellowjackets.

As Shanahan was naturally put up for press in his home country ahead of the Yellow Jackets’ meeting with the formidable Florida Tech Seminoles today, his head coach Brent Key swung an arm around his shoulder as he entered the media room at the Aviva.

Turning Shanahan to face the assembled press, Key began: “So, this guy right here… He has had more attention in the last — well, really it probably started 18 months ago, but now in the last week…

“And I hope he gets in the game and he doesn’t play one single snap!” the coach joked. A punter’s role, after all, is to boot away possession on the final down when a team’s offence has failed to make the requisite 10 yards to earn a fresh set.

“Let me just tell ya,” Key continued. “He is an unbelievable representative of yall’s country — for us and for you guys. He does unbelievable things, not just on the football field…

“I’m expecting a really big year for this guy but whenever that time comes when he’s done playing football, this man has a Georgia Tech education. And that ‘GT’ right there”, Key said, pointing towards the college’s badge on his hoodie, “that’s not just known in the United States. That’s known all over the world.”

That much was probably a stretch but it was illustrative of college football’s standing in the American zeitgeist.

While the NFL has a greater cultural foothold on this side of the pond, the collegiate game could argue that, in its own right, it’s the second most popular sport in America after its professional older brother. Basketball would probably win that argument but a significant college football game will often dwarf a regular-season NBA game in its TV viewership.

College ball is a billion-dollar industry and, since a Supreme Court ruling in 2021 which finally allowed its athletes to take a slice of the action, it has shed the farcical pretence that it is an ‘amateur’ sport.

There are cities and even states in America in which the nearest university football team is the team. Three in five people from Georgia Tech’s home base in Atlanta would tell you the Yellow Jackets are more popular than the NFL’s Falcons.

As such, today’s clash with Florida State — a ‘Week 0′ game with a standalone kickoff time of 5pm — is big business back in America, whatever about the €150-odd-million it’s supposedly worth to the Irish economy.

Case in point: for what is the eighth college football game to take place in Ireland since 1988 — and a third in a row since 2022 — ESPN have for the first time sent their big guns to Dublin.

The broadcaster’s flagship GameDay programme typically beams into over two million American living rooms every weekend from a selected university campus, and this week it will do so from College Green.

ESPN’s most valuable analyst, Pat McAfee, yesterday broadcast a boozy show with guests from J.R. Mahon’s on Burgh Quay, which appeared to go down exceptionally well with his regular viewers.

Even as early in the week as Wednesday and Thursday, after-work drinks outside the usual city-centre haunts took on an American hue as fans from both Georgia and Florida began to flock to sites of worship based on Twitter recommendations or past trips.

Today, there will be tailgates and hot dogs and morphsuits and whatever you’re having yourself, crowing a week of festivities which have added colour, and seemingly detracted very little, from the host city.

And at 5pm, there will be football as Georgia Tech, who finished a modest 7-6 last year, take on the formidable Florida State, who went 13-1 before getting trounced in the Orange Bowl.

And, unless his offence absolutely lights up Lansdowne Road, one man from Castleisland, Co. Kerry will take to the field to begin the final year of his college adventure.

The game kicks off at 5pm and will be broadcast live on TG4.

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