Will Ohio State football face a hostile crowd against Georgia in CFP semifinal?

ATLANTA — Shawn Murnahan remembers the swarm of LSU fans.

It was 15 years ago when Ohio State was facing the Tigers in a BCS national championship game held in New Orleans and they outnumbered him and the rest of the traveling Buckeyes fans.

“That was not a fun experience,” Murnahan said, “because the LSU fans are very, um, enthusiastic.”

Parallels could be drawn with that title game and Ohio State’s latest postseason destination. As in 2007, the Buckeyes are facing an SEC team in its backyard, meeting Georgia on Saturday in a College Football Playoff semifinal at the Peach Bowl. The site is less than an hour-and-a-half drive from Athens.

But Murnahan, an attorney who serves as the president of the Ohio State Alumni Club of Atlanta, doesn’t expect the crowd disparity at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium to be as drastic as the Superdome.

“I think we’ll be a little better represented than in that instance,” Murnahan said.

While the specter of a Georgia-heavy crowd looms large for the Buckeyes, a possibility that would bring a hostile atmosphere, Murnahan points to a handful of factors that could lead to close to evenly split attendance. Maybe only a 55-45, or 60-40, divide in favor of the Bulldogs, he reasons.

Not only do Ohio State fans travel well, but the school has an active base of alumni within Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs, among the approximately 7,800 alumni living throughout Georgia.

The Alumni Club of Atlanta hosts watch parties for games throughout the season at Hudson Grille, a local sports bar chain in Sandy Springs, and draws up to 700 people.

“If it’s Ohio State against Northwestern at noon on a rainy Saturday, we won’t have anywhere near that number,” Murnahan said.

But the bigger contests do bring them near the capacity of the restaurant’s main dining room, as he remembers the Buckeyes’ national championship run eight years ago.

“When we played Alabama and Oregon, for both of those games, it was packed,” Murnahan said. “Shoulder to shoulder.”

Gary Stokan, the chief executive for the Peach Bowl, said he doesn’t anticipate a de facto home game for Georgia.

“Obviously, we sell a lot of tickets locally,” Stokan said. “Are those Georgia people? I don’t know. Or are they buying those tickets because they knew we were going to have a semifinal and they’re going to put them on the secondary market? We found the secondary market is almost like the primary market now for games like this.”

The Peach Bowl allotted 12,500 tickets to each of the schools after selling more than 50,000 to local residents earlier this year. Both Ohio State and Georgia sold out their ticket allotments within days.

“I don’t think it’s going to be that far off with Ohio State fans in that stadium,” Stokan added.

For a lot of OSU fans in Atlanta, this matchup marks a rare opportunity to watch their team in the city.

The Buckeyes have never played in the Peach Bowl, nor visited Georgia Tech or Georgia State, the two Football Bowl Subdivision programs based here. Until the bowl became a part of the New Year’s Six in 2014, it paired teams from the ACC and SEC.

“I’ve been waiting 20 years or so for OSU to play in the Peach Bowl,” Murnahan said.

There are signs the crowd will still tilt in the Bulldogs’ favor. Data provided Thursday by the resale website TickPick said 47% of its purchases had come from ZIP codes within Georgia, while 17% are from Ohio.

Flight delays and cancellations on Southwest Airlines this week could also disrupt travel plans.

The Buckeyes have been preparing for a potential road-like environment, piping in artificial crowd noise during practices this week.

“It’s certainly going to be loud,” said OSU coach Ryan Day. “I know Ohio State is going to travel well, but we’ll also be ready for a loud environment and make sure we have all the tools ready if we need them.”

When Ohio State visited Penn State in October, the rabid crowd in Happy Valley set back a handful of its drives and caused issues with communication with quarterback C.J. Stroud. The Buckeyes were penalized three times for a delay of game.

“We don’t need to be perfect,” OSU offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson said, “but we need to be locked in with cadence.”

Wilson mentioned the possibility of going on a silent count as among the tools if crowd noise limits them before the snap.

“We’re kind of ready for all of it,” he said. “I think we’ll need all of it. We just have to fight through it and execute the best we can.”

While there are some challenges to the setting, cornerback Denzel Burke said the hostility will feed into their underdog role with Georgia remaining favored by a touchdown in a stadium it has already played two games in earlier this season.

“We like being the underdog,” Burke said. “I like away games, too. We’re excited.”

Joey Kaufman covers Ohio State football for The Columbus Dispatch. Contact him at jkaufman@dispatch.com or on Twitter @joeyrkaufman.

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: What will be crowd split for CFP semis between Ohio State, Georgia?