(Reuters) – In 2019, Dante Lucchesi and his Champs Sports Grill in State College, Pennsylvania, were on a roll.
The 400-seat restaurant his father opened in 1986 was full every weekend when Penn State University’s powerhouse football team took the field.
The downtown location he added in 2017, with roughly twice the capacity and just over a block from campus, was the runner-up in Barstool Sports’ Best College Bar contest and host to a surprise Jonas Brothers concert featured on the Today Show.
But now, like thousands of local business owners in university towns across the country, Lucchesi faces the unthinkable: A year of college football wiped off the calendar because of a pandemic that has torpedoed the economy and may rewrite the rules for mass public gatherings.
On seven or eight weekends each fall, thousands of fans and alumni pour into State College, a town of fewer than 45,000, to watch the Nittany Lions football team. In a region that saw no economic growth in 2018, the last year for which local-level data is available, football weekends are vital.
“I don’t have the answers. I’m not going to pretend like I do,” said Lucchesi. “My business hinges on this, on the football season and everything.”
Seven hundred miles south in Athens, Georgia, Peter Dale is anxiously awaiting word on season plans for the Sugar Bowl-winning University of Georgia and what it might mean for his three restaurants – the National, Seabear and Maepole.
“People are just now starting to think about what are some of the options, but none of them are very good,” he said.
David Bradley, head of the local chamber of commerce, estimated 220,000 out-of-towne