College Football Hall of Fame: 150 years of history going beyond the museum

150 years of football memories are fantastically displayed at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta.

When you think of a Hall of Fame or museum, images of lifeless statues and paintings may come to mind, with overdressed patrons meandering through cold hallways adorned with glass cases, velvet ropes, and iridescent lighting.

The College Football Hall of Fame is no such place.

You may also think that once you visit a Hall of Fame that you’ve seen everything you want or need to see until another person you idolize is inducted. You may believe the only changes made are the new busts and placards which are added as new members are welcomed in.

The College Football Hall of Fame scoffs at that notion.

In Atlanta, Georgia, the College Football Hall of Fame offers more than just a glimpse at artifacts and faces from the past, it is the hall where the stories that have shaped the sport of college football are meticulously kept and shared for the world to experience.

It is a building where memories which may have once only been passed down from father to son are able to be shown for us all to see, and where the thoughts, actions, and words of great men and women are found at every turn and on every wall.

It is the place where history meets technology and where museum-goers are treated to more than just a walk through torpid exhibits. There is life in this building, and it takes countless hours of work to keep it breathing.

College football is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and there’s no better place to relive some of your favorite mental souvenirs or to learn about games, coaches, and players who came before your memories.

I recently spent a day at the College Football Hall of Fame (a place I’ve visited a number of times) including a trip to “The Vault” where thousands upon thousands of artifacts and exhibit pieces currently not displayed in the hall are stored. While there, I was able to spend time with the Hall of Fame’s CEO, Dennis Adamovich, as well as the two chief curators and historians, Kent Stephens and Jeremy Swick.

As I walked through the sleek, ultra modern-looking offices at the Hall of Fame, I tried to imagine in my mind what the vault must look like. Was this a thief-proof bank vault, complete with a 24-inch thick, steel-reinforced concrete door and a time lock that even Hans Gruber’s henchmen would have trouble accessing? Would it be a bullet-proof, plexiglass room with humidifiers and air holes throughout the perimeter of the building?

I had visions of a college football version of the inner sanctum in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory buzzing through my head.

Not even close.

No, instead I was shown to a locked office door, leading to a somewhat dusty and unassuming room lined wall-to-wall with common, metal shelving. Every shelf, every table, and every inch of wall space was occupied. It looked like the collections from an entire stadium’s worth of grandfathers had been packed up and stored until an auctioneer came around to peddle them to the highest bidder.

But once inside, viewing the trinkets and pieces of history laid about in this massive closet, it was clear the vault was so much more. I could almost feel the living history of 150 years by merely glancing around the crowded shelves and busy tables.

“We’re really all about telling the stories,” Adamovich told me as we casually sauntered our way through the building. “We are so much more than just a place to mark the great players of the sport. Every great story can be told here, and throughout the year we have new ones to be told.”

Those stories are told in more than just placards placed within display cases or murals on walls. From the digital and interactive parts of the Hall, to a small box of dirt taken from the field where the first college football game in history took place, the College Football Hall of Fame is the next best thing to sitting on grandpa’s knee to hear a lifetime of stories about the sport we all love.

Walking into the vault would make any college football fan feel like a child who had just been granted every wish ever wished on a star. The shelves are packed with trophies, helmets, memorabilia, and boxes upon boxes of historic jerseys. The walls are filled with old magazines, newspaper clippings, books, and old game programs.

The findings aren’t just limited to items once belonging to players and coaches either. Band uniforms, mascot costumes, referee equipment and pieces of history direct from stadiums are stored and ready to be used in programmatic or special event displays.

I felt like I needed to genuflect when I was shown a pair of original benches from Notre Dame Stadium.

And if you enjoy looking at photos or film clips, this is your nirvana.

“We are working on digitizing every photo and piece of film we have,” historian Kent Stephens told me.

“All of the original photos and films are sent to XOS Digital, in Florida, where they are being digitized so we can catalog them. Beyond just the titles or names involved, we can enter lots of different metadata to help us pull clips or photos quickly when they are needed for programmatic displays, or when someone like ESPN calls us asking for something for a story.”

This isn’t just sending a few boxes of photos to be cataloged either. Literally millions of photos from decades of games and events, along with film clips of everything having to do with college football that you could imagine will eventually be completely available in digital format.

Imagine someone from ESPN contacting the Hall of Fame and saying, “I need about 30 photos and half a dozen film clips for player X against school B, happening between 1945-1947”. The curators would be able to plug in that specific metadata and have what the network needed almost instantaneously.

The task of that metadata creation and cataloging falls mostly on the shoulders of Jeremy Swick, who had previously worked at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio before coming to Atlanta.

“It’s a huge task and it takes a lot of patience,” Swick told me. “It seems every time I feel like I have a handle on things the next big project comes up and I start from scratch.”

One such project was being put together during my visit. The staff was preparing for the induction of this year’s Hall of Fame class, and the artifacts and memorabilia tied to legendary NC State wide receiver Torry Holt were being gathered and set up for the display honoring him at this year’s induction ceremony.

The collection of his player memorabilia is a combination of items already held in the vault, as well as items donated by Holt and his family.

“Many times the players will start off letting us borrow items to put into a programmatic display such as this”, Stephens told me. “But once they see the impact their items can have and how they look as part of an overall picture of their career, many times they offer to just allow us to keep them. We’re grateful to players when that does happen.”

The tables with Holt’s items ranged from his Biletnikoff Award to autographed items and photographs, and even a Starter action figure. The curators take these items, plan out the space needed and then do their work making it look aesthetically pleasing while still keeping it so patrons are able to understand the history behind the items.

When finished, a display can paint the picture of a player’s life within the game. It can tell a story of how a player became a Hall of Famer and the arduous work that went into his greatness. This was the story of Torry Holt being made ready for the public to read.

Had you found yourself strolling through the menagerie of trinkets, helmets, and televisions at the College Football Hall of Fame on the day I visited, one story you would have seen told was of Georgia and Notre Dame. Two ancient and storied schools and football programs, who, despite being considered national brands, had only met twice before, with the third meeting upcoming that week.

Without cue cards, without the aid of the now commonly used “hype video”, and without the voice of a narrator, you would have seen how every meeting between the Bulldogs and Fighting Irish was one of national interest and became the apex of the college football world at its time.

How on January 1, 1981, these two powerhouses met in New Orleans for the chance to call themselves national champions. How on September 9, 2017, the Bulldog Nation was warmly welcomed to South Bend for the first time, and how they subsequently turned Notre Dame Stadium into Sanford Stadium north. How the upcoming meeting would again likely shape the end of the season.

It was all there. All in a couple of simple glass cases. Shoes, jackets, programs, jerseys and more — all telling the story of what was between two football programs, and what was to come later that week. Inanimate objects that seemed to have an almost mystical ability to invoke memories and emotion.

You could have stared at the game-worn shoes and thought about Herschel Walker, diving his way over the Notre Dame defense to put the Bulldogs in front for good in the Sugar Bowl, or Scott Woerner’s interception which sealed the win. You may have remembered Terry Godwin‘s game-winning catch in the corner of the endzone at Notre Dame Stadium, or babyfaced freshman Jake Fromm growing up in front of a nation’s eyes.

Two schools. Three games. Millions of fans. The story was there to be read and savored for those who wanted to open the pages of their minds.

It’s virtually impossible to squeeze 150 years of college football history into one building, no matter how vast the available space and organized the displays may be. That’s why the College Football Hall of Fame is an ever-evolving, magnificent collection.

Artifacts are constantly rotated in and out of the vault, and programmatic displays — such as the Georgia-Notre Dame feature or those honoring the newest members of the Hall of Fame — are shuffled around by the curators as if they were calling plays in a two-minute drill.

History is right there at your fingertips and along every step you take inside the Hall of Fame.

Perhaps you’ll never get the opportunity to set foot on Mountaineer Field at Milan Puskar Stadium, but at the Hall of Fame, you can literally put your hands on a piece of the coal slab honoring the miners who lost their lives in 2010 that West Virginia players would touch as they entered the field.

You may have only heard the stories about legendary players and coaches from the school which is dear to your heart, as told through the words and eyes of television networks or family elders. At the Hall of Fame, you can see and experience them yourself.

You could learn how the first penalty flag came about, or how officials literally kept time on the field by being hard-wired into the scoreboard.

The College Football Hall of Fame offers so much more than just a massive wall of helmets or a virtual reality experience in your favorite stadium. There is more to see than just trophies or mannequins adorned in game jerseys and pads.

There is a library full of stories like these just aching to be read. Below you can see just a small sample of items in the vault. Perhaps one of these will be on display on your next visit.