Cold Shower After Pittsburgh Bash

The publicity was great. The Rust Belt is back. Well, not yet:

The two Atlanta sports leaders knew that attendance at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind., had not met expectations.

The stadium-shaped hall opened in 1995 to promises of 200,000 annual visitors, but attendance dwindled to about 60,000 a year over the past decade.

So Stokan, president of the Chick-fil-A Bowl, and Morris, a college football hall of famer himself, made a quiet pitch to the hall’s leadership, the National Football Foundation: If you ever decide to leave South Bend, Atlanta would do the hall right.

On Thursday, Stokan announced that Atlanta beat out Dallas to be the new home of the hall in the fall of 2012.

Can the albatross of legacy costs be far behind?