ESPN on College Green, Maniac 2000, and Georgia Tech sting FSU: A day at the college football

Gavan Casey reports from the Aviva Stadium

JUST OVER TWO decades ago, the great Adam Schlesinger took the piss out of his fellow songwriters the world over when he reverse-engineered a power-pop masterpiece from the most well-worn cliché in American sports commentary.

‘All Kinds of Time’, released by Schlesinger’s band, Fountains of Wayne, on their Welcome Interstate Managers album in 2003, is a four-minute-and-twenty-second anthem about 10 seconds in the life of an American football quarterback.

If one of the sport’s beat writers had scribbled down the lyrics verbatim and submitted it to a newspaper before Schlesinger committed it to music, they would have been heralded as a unique journalistic talent.

Schlesinger, who passed away as a result of Covid-19 complications in 2020, wrote a piece which exquisitely details an athlete achieving a ‘state of flow’ long before the concept entered the wider sporting lexicon. He still has us singing along to his match report 21 years later. God, he was some bollocks.

Some things shouldn’t really go together but just work. Fountains of Wayne made popcorn and chocolate out of power-pop melody and sportswriting prose.

It turns out that Aidan J. Prendergast and Jim O’Brien, too, were onto something when they paired NCAA football with Dublin.

Prendergast, a former president of Ireland’s American Football Association, first conceived the idea of dragging a game across to his homeland in the mid-1980s.

O’Brien, a Boston College tackle from the early ’60s who went on to become a highly successful businessman in his native Beantown, had a similar idea upon one of his many visits to the motherland in 1986.

Prendergast worked the Irish side. O’Brien rallied his alma mater. Two years later, Boston College met the Army in front of over 42,000 fans at Lansdowne Road as part of a promotional campaign to mark Dublin’s millennium celebrations. It was the first ever college football game to take place outside of the USA.

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There have been seven NCAA football games staged in Dublin in the years since but only recently — with back-to-back games in 2022, last year and this year — has the concept felt like it has properly taken root.

Today’s meeting of Florida State University and Georgia Tech, which saw the latter upset FSU 24-21, was the second consecutive Aer Lingus Classic to fully sell out the Aviva Stadium — and the first for which ‘the Ireland game’ was granted prime real estate in the American sporting landscape.

That was evident as soon as you set foot on the southside of O’Connell Bridge on Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t just the sheer masses of Americans in circulation but the fact that Dame Street up as far as College Green had been turned into an outdoor TV studio for ESPN.

College GameDay, one of the American sports network’s flagship programmes, typically sets up for the day at a university campus somewhere across the Atlantic from where its panel will discuss multiple fixtures throughout its broadcast. Today, however, ESPN pitched up for the first time outside Trinity College where legendary American football coach Nick Saban (seven-time national champion, six of them with Alabama) joined the panel on his full debut as a pundit.

More impressive, however, was the presence alone of livewire panel member Pat McAfee, who sank enough pints during the live broadcast of his own ESPN talk show from J.R. Mahon’s pub yesterday that he would have been forgiven for booking an immediate flight home.

Instead, former wrestling commentator McAfee conjured the energy from within to intermittently whip the live audience — basically half of Dame Street by 2pm — into a fervour of chants and raised signs and generally harmless American carry-on.

Of the 25,000 supporters from Georgia and Florida who travelled, plenty spilled onto Grafton Street where Cork singer-songwriter Ali Sherlock — a teenager whose viral busking covers have earned her more than three million Instagram followers — brought footfall to a virtual standstill as she promoted her upcoming tour.

A few cobbles up along, a costume stall encouraged that you ‘Leprechaun Yourself’. In fairness to our guests, business was exceptionally slow.

Notable on the procession to Lansdowne Road were the number of Irish accents spilling out of pubs in NFL jerseys. There was no need for visitor to seek common ground with their host — they were already standing on it.

For every group of four students from either Georgia Tech or LSU, there was equally a family of four sporting university colours. College football in America isn’t just for college attendees or alumni; there are vast portions of the country — FSU’s home city of Tallahassee being a prime example — in which the university is the only major sporting institution for hours.

One could only imagine the crackle of excitement among family and friends of Kerry-born Georgia Tech punter David Shanahan, many of whom were making the same walk in Yellow Jackets gear to watch him in person for the first time.

Shanahan might have been thinking the same thing when he took his first long snap with 1:20 left in the first quarter and sliced his clearing kick horribly off his left boot.

The Castleisland native had been given a hero’s introduction to the field only seconds earlier but his first action brought the wrong side of the stadium to its feet. Thankfully for Shanahan and Georgia Tech, his loose kick found grass rather than a red jersey and the Yellow Jackets’ special teams unit mitigated the loss of territory.

The first Irish-raised player ever to receive a football scholarship from a school of Georgia Tech’s stature, Shanahan fared far better with his second punt just over five minutes into the third quarter.

In all, though, his services were barely required as Georgia Tech — tipped as a sleeper by Nick Saban during ESPN’s broadcast — more than put it up to FSU, who were listed 10th in the Associated Press’ annual pre-season top 25.

After a week of tailgating and Pat McAfee necking pints of cream, Irish and American cultures again met in the middle as native tunes like Maniac 2000 and Where’s Me Jumper were stitched into the largely hip-hop stadium soundtrack. Shazam was busy.

It helped that the game itself was an absolute joyride from start to finish but if we learn anything from college football, it should be how they generate a sense of occasion even in a stadium thousands of miles from home. Sold-out rugby internationals in the same ground — and this writer has worked at the last dozen or so — sound like Covid games in comparison to Georgia Tech v FSU. And with apologies to the great Gerry Thornley who has sought solutions to the same problem for a long time, there wasn’t a free hand in the ground such was the level of pinting being done.

Fitting that on the day that was in it, a man named Aidan Birr provoked the final crescendo as his last-play, 34-yard field goal earned a stunning victory for Georgia Tech over the much fancied Floridians.

As one side of the Aviva vibrated with white noise, the red side emptied almost entirely within two minutes.

Both colours will converge on the streets of Dublin and, on today’s evidence, produce only the best kind of bedlam. We might even join them.