Georgia’s playing at Notre Dame for the first time, so UGA fans are mobbing every sporting event in the area

Expect to see a ton of red and black in Notre Dame country through Sunday.

You’ve probably heard about the plane full of Georgia fans who refused to take a slightly later Friday flight toward Notre Dame in exchange for $3,000.

The Dawgs are pumped about this road trip. This is the first-ever regular-season game between these two teams (they played with UGA’s 1980 title on the line) and thus UGA’s first-ever trip to South Bend (though not #actually UGA’s first trip north since 1965, as the viral stat claims).

"I know our fan base is really excited. Our team is excited," UGA coach Kirby Smart said this week. "I mean, it will be the first team ever from Georgia to get to go to South Bend and play, and we are excited for that opportunity."

It’s looking like a ton of traveling fans will be in and around Notre Dame Stadium Saturday night (7:30 p.m. ET, NBC).

1. With baseball at Wrigley on Friday and the Falcons in Chicago on Sunday, Georgians just keep showing up everywhere.

The schedule set up a whole weekend of this in the area:

Treating the first pitch like a UGA kickoff:

“UGA” chants ringing out at Wrigley:

UGA chants filling up the darn bathrooms:

2. The ticket’s been extremely hard to come by.

"This has been the most difficult ticket I have seen during my years at UGA," said associated athletic director Claude Felton, who has been with the University of Georgia sports information department since 1979. "There are large numbers of Bulldog supporters heading to South Bend with no tickets. They just want to be part of the experience."

Georgia received — and quickly sold — 8,000 tickets for the game at Notre Dame Stadium. Secondary market ticket prices were in the $1,600 range during August, though fans that waited it out could have snagged a nose-bleed seat Thursday for $500 on StubHub.

3. Like, extremely.

Word has been spreading like wildfire about a ticket broker named Jeff Cook, who runs a ticket site called AllSports. Cook sold tickets to hundreds of Georgia fans, but recently he has begun sending notices that he cannot provide tickets to everyone.

"He kind of oversold our allotment. Myself and a couple other hundred Dog fans specifically got letters in the mail or got notified that he oversold his allotment and weren’t getting tickets," Welch said.

It was during the drive when Welch realized he was probably one of the hundreds that won't be getting a ticket from Cook, although he hasn't been able to get in touch with him to find out.

During the drive, they began scrambling. Calling, emailing, pleading with anyone they could to somehow obtain the most expensive college football ticket this season.

4. Plenty of them didn’t even plan on going inside, though. From ESPN’s Coley Harvey:

Spoke with an usher who said he's never seen this many fans lining up to greet the visiting team before it arrived to Notre Dame Stadium. He's ready to compare the scene tonight to the famed Nebraska "red-out" of 2000. We'll see. Many of these Georgia fans won't be inside the stadium. Spoken with several who at the very least just wanted to be here.

5. You’ve probably also seen the video of a few UGA fans taking over the joint where ND’s head coach records his weekly show:

“We know there’s going to be some black and some red in the stands,” coach Brian Kelly said even before that video. “We get that. I think 8,000 tickets are what they were probably allotted. It could be times two. We’ll be ready for that. We’ve seen how Texas traveled their first time up here. We saw Nebraska their first time up here. That won’t affect us. We’ll have a pretty good fan base here, too.”

Fans want to see South Bend. For a lot of people, it’s college football holy ground. Nebraska mobbed Notre Dame Stadium in 2000, with a lingering debate among Irish fans about whether it’s ever OK to sell a ticket to a road fan.