When the GHSA announced that the Georgia football state championships would be held in Mercedes-Benz Stadium once again this year, many people were initially concerned. Of course, it’s great for the kids. Playing in an NFL stadium grants them memories that they will not soon forget. However, a condition the GHSA had to meet in order to play these games inside the home of the Falcons was that the games had to be played in the early days of the week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The initial reaction was confusion. Why would you play your championship games on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday? People have to work, kids have to go to school, people have things they have to do. Not like Friday or Saturday. Won’t this hurt attendance?

Those who begged those questions could not have been more wrong. The GHSA reported record attendance numbers that broke the previous record of 47,922 by 2,700. That previous record was set back in 2016 in the Georgia Dome.

The 50,622 Georgia high school football fans in attendance made the average fan attendance of the last four years, which was 27,442, look like a middle school pep rally.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium opened in 2017 and eight Georgia State Championship games were played in the new stadium in front of just over 41,000 fans that year. They hosted the championship in “The Benz” again in 2018, but in 2019 changed the venue to Center Parc Stadium, home of the Georgia State Panthers. From 2019-2021 the State Championship games drew less than 30,000 and brought in a record low in 2021 with 22,631 fans for eight football games and three flag football games.

In 2022 attendance jumped back up to 40,462, but this years attendance drew over 10,000 more, proving to doubters that a midweek schedule doesn’t matter when a championship is on the line.