Calling all sports bars

The NFL’s regular season is back, meaning die-hard fans, fantasy football players, and a host of other fans are once again glued to their TV sets every Sunday. 

As a long-time fantasy football player, I’m usually one of the many Americans flipping through the different games and NFL RedZone options every Sunday. However, my main fantasy football league was celebrating its 10-year anniversary in Atlanta on Sept. 13, and we wanted to find a sports bar with a bunch of games on, good food, a nice drink menu, and some fellow fans to watch with. This task ended up being a lot more difficult than expected. 

Several sports bars that we called and drove to were only playing the Atlanta Falcons’ game, which makes sense considering the Falcons’ season opener was in Pennsylvania. Several places we went to had a respectable amount of televisions, but were not willing to put NFL games on all of them, despite Sunday being the opening day of the season. 

The few sports bars we could find catering to the general NFL crowd were so busy by 12:30 p.m. that we feared our ability to get a table and service by the time the games started at 1 p.m. These sports bars, such as Midway Pub in East Atlanta Village, had to have been some of the busiest restaurants in Atlanta on Sunday morning, with the only option for watching the games being should-to-shoulder standing-room-only options. The atmosphere looked great, but we were too late to fully enjoy it – despite getting there “early” in terms of kickoff time. 

We landed on a somewhat recently renovated Urban Pie in Kirkwood, whose bar-takeover menus left us glad that we didn’t settle on any of the others – especially with five-plus TVs in sight from every seat. Still, the search left me confused about how it took so long to find a locally owned sports bar with the games on.  

I’m a big fan of television and movies, but I am just as big of a sports fan. Every form of media has its place, but I think the experience of seeing which restaurants were packed on Sunday versus which were relatively empty would be an eye-opening experience for anyone looking to sell a few extra drinks and pizzas. 

Here’s to hoping it was a rare combination of a Falcons opening week road game and large first-week crowds that made the hunt so far, as watching football in a crowded—but still accessible—sports bar is hard to beat for fantasy football and NFL fans.