The Goodyear Blimp Made the College Football Hall of Fame

Every college football fan knows the shot: the camera pulls wide, and there it is, floating silently above the stadium with its name lit up in lights. In January 2019, the Goodyear Blimp got something no camera angle ever earned it - a spot in the College Football Hall of Fame. The honorary induction is the only one in the museum's history for something that isn't a person.

Since the 1955 Rose Bowl

The blimp's relationship with college football goes back further than almost anyone watching today has been alive.

Goodyear's airship provided aerial coverage of the 1955 Rose Bowl telecast, one of the earliest uses of a blimp to give TV viewers a view from above the field.

By the time of its 2019 induction, the company said the blimp had covered more than 2,000 games over 64 years, showing up for national championships, rivalry weekends, and everything in between.

An Honorary Spot Among Over 1,300 Names

The Chick-fil-A College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta enshrines players and coaches who are voted in by a national panel. More than 1,300 people have earned a place there.

The blimp did not go through that vote. The National Football Foundation gave it a separate, one-time honorary induction instead, calling it the first non-player or coach ever added to the Hall.

"College players and fans know that when the Goodyear Blimp shows up, it's a big game," said Archie Manning, chairman of the National Football Foundation, at the announcement.

ESPN analyst and former Ohio State quarterback Kirk Herbstreit put it from a player's point of view: "For me, playing under the blimp felt like a payoff for the hard work that goes into game day."

Goodyear's Todd Macsuga added that the blimp "has established itself as a symbol of the greatness that takes place on college football fields."

What's Actually in Atlanta

There is no bust of the blimp sitting on a shelf. Instead, the Hall of Fame promised it a proper exhibit.

Later in 2019, the museum said it would add a permanent display with historical blimp artifacts, old broadcast footage, and photos tracing its decades on the sideline.

The building itself holds 50,000 square feet of exhibits and a 45-yard indoor football field, so the blimp joined a museum built at the same larger-than-life scale it flies at.

Not Even a True Blimp Anymore

Here's the twist: the aircraft hanging in the sky today is not technically a blimp at all.

Goodyear began replacing its fleet with semi-rigid airships built with Zeppelin in 2014, each with a rigid internal frame, and retired its last true blimp, a non-rigid airship with no internal skeleton, in 2017.

Goodyear still calls them blimps out of habit, and so does everyone else. The Hall of Fame induction isn't rewriting that anytime soon.