Notre Dame’s historic trip to Athens was already poised to be among the hottest tickets in the nation for the 2019 season but we had no idea the capacity of Sanford Stadium would be expanded just to accommodate everyone in the building.

That’s exactly the plan in Athens, however, according to Chip Towers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The reason behind the expansion is simple, in order to provide Notre Dame with the allotted 8,000 tickets Georgia promised the Fighting Irish when this home-and-home series was set, Sanford Stadium will need to be expanded by 500 seats.

Georiga AD Greg McGarity explained the decision this week in Athens, looking ahead to the Week 4 game.

“This is all due to our up-front request to maximize our seating block at Notre Dame (in 2017),” McGarity said regarding the decision to add the seats. “They offered us 8,000 seats and we accepted it, even though we knew we didn’t have room for that many here. We knew we were taking a risk, but it was extremely important to us to get 500 more seats; 500 tickets is like gold to our fans. So, I wanted to be able to get as many as we could, and we’d figure it out later.”

Georgia is set to host Notre Dame on Saturday, Sept. 21 at 8 p.m. ET in a game televised nationally by CBS.