They Rebranded a Rivalry, and Everyone Hates It

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College football season is right around the corner. I can just about smell the tailgate grills and hear the trumpeter warm up for the Battle Hymn at Sanford Stadium.

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Of course, part of what makes college football so great is the rivalries. For my Georgia Bulldogs, our in-state rival is Georgia Tech. We’ve traditionally played the Yellow Jackets the Saturday after Thanksgiving in a rivalry that took on the name “Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate.”

For some reason, the powers that be moved last year’s game to Black Friday, and it resulted in an eight-overtime nailbiter, with the Bulldogs coming out on top. The joke is that we had to play so many overtimes so that the game could end on Saturday as it should have.

This year, we’re playing on Black Friday again, and the two teams will face off at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Naturally, the game has a corporate sponsor — what doesn’t nowadays? — and the corporate sponsorship is ruining the title of this major rivalry game.

Instead of Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate, this year’s game is going by the most awkward name in years. The Dawgs and the Yellow Jackets are playing in the Invesco QQQ Atlanta Gridiron Classic, and nobody on either side is thrilled with it.

Related: There Are No Participation Trophies in College Football — Unless You Play for Georgia Tech

“If modern college football has taught us anything, it’s that when you have the opportunity to minimize an incredibly recognizable rivalry between 2 passionate fan bases, you absolutely have to take it,” writes Derek Peterson at Saturday Down South. “Nothing screams ‘pageantry’ like milquetoast game names with a sponsor flag slapped over the top of it.”

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I'm sure Invesco QQQ paid a pretty penny to sponsor this game, but it's a mouthful of a sponsor name. It also drains this game of the wild and crazy history that Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate represents.

Even people outside the Georgia sports sphere are noticing how dumb the name for this game is. It’s ripe for mockery like nothing else in college football right now.

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To be fair, two other teams will play in the Invesco QQQ Atlanta Gridiron Classic next year, but slapping a sponsor name on a longstanding rivalry game is a bad idea in general. The corporate sponsors who ruin almost everything they touch will insist on making sure the world knows that this game is the Invesco QQQ Atlanta Gridiron Classic, and we all know that ESPN will dutifully follow. But I can assure you that the fans of the teams playing in this game will call it what it really is: Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate.

If you're sick of seeing everything sacred — even college football rivalries — steamrolled by soulless branding deals, you're not alone.

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