If Georgia State never wins another game or scores another point, the Panthers and their fans can say this: On Sept. 2, 2010, a start-up college-football program outdrew a first-place big-league baseball club head to head. On its first time out of the box, GSU served notice that there’s enthusiasm in this city for this brand new team.
And that wasn’t always a given. Indeed, there were those — that’s my hand you see raised — who feared GSU would unveil its football team to an intimate gathering of friends and family beneath the cavernous Georgia Dome. But there was nothing small about the crowd Thursday night, and there was nothing intimate about the setting.
The Dome’s lower bowl was full, and the overflow spilled upward into the second tier. Cheryl Levick, GSU’s athletic director, reported that there were 11,000 students on hand, and certainly her estimate didn’t seem fanciful. The students arrived early and yelled all night — they even shrieked after a successful Panthers fair catch — and they roared their approval when the school president took a pregame walk in front of their end zone.
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