126 Years on the Wrong Weekend

For 126 years, Morehouse and Clark Atlanta have played each other. For most of them, at the end of something.

They first met in 1900, when Morehouse was called Atlanta Baptist College and Clark Atlanta was Clark College. For decades the game closed the regular season, and the organizers of the new one said out loud why that stopped working: the old slot landed after "injuries, postseason eliminations and fan fatigue had diminished the excitement."

That is an unusually honest thing to say about your own tradition. It is also obviously correct.

So they moved it.

Saturday afternoon, September 5, B.T. Harvey Stadium, on the Morehouse campus at Lowery and West End. Clark Atlanta 31, Morehouse 21. The branding came after — the sponsors, the performances, the name on the banner. The decision was about a date. For the first time in its 126-year history, this rivalry sat at the front of the season instead of the end of one. It opened conference play for both schools.

The game paid that off inside two minutes. Three plays, 39 yards, 1:53 off the clock, Trayvon Pinder in the end zone — an emphatic way for a brand-new event to introduce itself. Clark Atlanta finished with 394 yards on 50 plays, 7.9 every time they snapped it, and Xzavier Jackson threw touchdowns of 14 and 51 yards to Chry'shawn Sellers.

Morehouse held the ball for 35:05. Clark Atlanta held it for 24:55. So Morehouse had it 10 minutes longer, ran 23 more plays, got 105 yards and 2 touchdowns on 11 carries out of Chase DeVaughn, and lost by 10. Time of possession measures patience. Explosive plays measure everything patience cannot control. Terry Sims, hired at Clark Atlanta in January, got his first win there in the first game anybody was ever going to remember.

The announced crowd was 9,736. B.T. Harvey Stadium is listed at 9,000.

Announced attendance is a generous genre — standing room, comps, no turnstile, and the two outlets carrying this one may be working from the same count the school handed out. Hold it loosely. But the listed capacity is the part worth sitting with: whoever counted that room decided it was over-full, on the first try, at a football game that did not exist last September.

Jerry Freeman, one of two co-founders named publicly alongside DeVonn Baker, told TheGrio in July, before any of this had been tested: "Let's take something that's good and let's make it better." And, separately: "At the end of the day, we have to impact these students. We're gonna party, but we're also gonna do those things that need to be done."

That second one is the most Atlanta sentence in the whole story. Performers and scholarship presentations on the same run sheet, community health events on the same week's calendar. Nobody has published what the scholarships came to and I am not going to estimate it. But joy first, out loud, then the work, also out loud — that is how this city has built most of what it is proud of.

Here is the weather all of this happened in. Six days from their opener at Pittsburgh, the Falcons still have not said who is playing quarterback; Michael Penix Jr. and Tua Tagovailoa are both live and Kevin Stefanski has given no timeline. Atlanta United sit 14th of 15 in the Eastern Conference, 22 points from 23 matches. Miles has the quarterback question this morning and Tito has United.

None of which the Classic beat, or exposed, or replaced. One crowd, one Saturday, one inaugural event — a genuine achievement, not a verdict on anybody else. Any sentence that turns 9,736 people in the West End into evidence about Falcons season tickets is doing more work than the facts will pay for.

What it is, is a fact about inventory. Atlanta's Labor Day weekend contained a pro football team that could not name a quarterback, a soccer team second from the bottom of its conference, and a 126-year-old rivalry playing on the best date it has ever had, in front of more people than its building is listed to hold. Those are not competing entries. They are the same list.

Four days ago I wrote about the College Park Skyhawks filling a general manager job, a head coaching job and an associate head coaching job entirely from inside the building. The Classic runs the other direction. Nobody in the Atlanta University Center needed a franchise, a league or a global tournament for this. Mercedes-Benz Stadium hosted eight World Cup matches this summer, a semifinal among them, and none of that machinery touched Saturday afternoon at Lowery and West End. Two people with a sponsor list and a better idea about a date did that.

Whether it holds is the only open question. The founders say they intend to make it annual, but intent is not a contract, and first years are easy — everybody comes to a first.

The date is the thing to watch. For most of 126 years this game was where a season went to end. On Saturday it sat at the front of one. That is a harder thing to ask of a rivalry: not a farewell anybody can skip, but a promise that there is a season behind it worth staying for. Which does not get settled by a crowd count. It gets settled next September, by whether anybody comes back.