SEC Media Days, the league’s annual preview of football season, will return to downtown Atlanta next year.
The much-hyped four-day event, at which more than 1,000 media members hear from coaches and players representing the 14 SEC teams, will be held at the College Football Hall of Fame in July 2020 for the second time in three years.
“As I said before (last year’s event), ‘Let us prove we can do it, and we’ll get them back.’ And they’re back,” Hall of Fame CEO Dennis Adamovich said Monday. “We’re the right place. We’re the epicenter of college football.”
Until last year in Atlanta, SEC Media Days had been held in Birmingham or neighboring Hoover, Ala., every year since 1985. The event is again in Hoover this week, but SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey has signaled that going forward the intention is to move it around to various parts of the conference footprint. It will be held in Nashville, Tenn., in 2021.
Sankey announced the sites for the next two years Monday and said the decision to return the event to the Hall of Fame in 2020 came “after the success of Atlanta last year.”
Adamovich said it “makes a lot of sense” for the SEC to hold the event in the 95,000-square-foot facility already filled with “the stories of college football.”
For last year's event, a blue carpet was spread through the Hall of Fame lobby, with admission to that area free for fans to greet arriving players and coaches. The venue's 45-yard-long indoor playing field was converted to a main staging area for coaches' news conferences and player interviews, creating what Sankey called at the time a "special and unique" setting for the event with its artificial turf and goal posts.
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