When the University of Georgia and Notre Dame University agreed to a home-and-home football series, one of the conditions was that Georgia would provide 8,000 tickets to Notre Dame for the game held between the hedges in Athens.
However, there aren’t enough seats in Sanford Stadium to accommodate all of those 8,000, as well as thousands of Bulldogs fans. The solution? Temporary bleachers.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that temporary aluminum bleachers will be brought into Sanford Stadium ahead of the game and installed beneath the scoreboard near the back of Sections 143 and 139. The result will expand the seating capacity of the stadium — for one night, at least — to 93,246, up from the official capacity of 92,746.
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“This is all due to our up-front request to maximize our seating block at Notre Dame (in 2017),” UGA athletic director Greg McGarity told the Journal-Constitution. “They offered us 8,000 seats and we accepted it, even though we knew we didn’t have room for that many here. We knew we were taking a risk, but it was extremely important to us to get 500 more seats; 500 tickets is like gold to our fans. So, I wanted to be able to get as many as we could, and we’d figure it out later.”
Georgia students will move from student-seating to the temporary bleachers to allow for the expansion of visitors seating for the contest.
The Sept. 21 game, which will likely be the first where Sanford Stadium’s new color-changing LED lighting system can be used, is expected to be a record-breaking sellout.
