ATLANTA — Maybe it’s the Dr Pepper "Playoffuary" Fan Experience, where a cardboard standup of Sheriff Bosworth welcomes you to a winding (and social media-friendly) college football wonderland. Maybe it’s the Chick-Fil-A inflatable helmet the size of a modest family home. Maybe it’s the scent of Eckrich, the Official Smoked Sausage and Deli Meat Sponsor of the College Football Playoff, or the 50-yard golden USA Football field that covers a huge chunk of the Georgia World Congress Center. Maybe it’s all these brand activations and more, a massive traveling-sponsor circus that now accompanies the College Football Playoff. Whatever, the effect is inescapable. We’re a long, long way now from tailgates, Saturday afternoons and fight songs.

Welcome to the new world of the College Football Playoff. Branding and experiences are the rule, and the game is merely a pretext for it all. As Ohio State and Notre Dame prepare to battle for the national championship on Monday night in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the sponsor-driven pomp and circumstance have hit overwhelming levels. College football is now the NFL with younger players, better music and wilder storylines. Whether you think that’s a positive change or not doesn’t really matter; it’s here, and it’s not scaling back for the foreseeable future.

The level of spectacle will come as no shock to anyone who’s followed the sport through its explosive growth over the last few years, but it’s still a bit of an ironic disconnect. This sport that spent most of its existence hiding behind the fig leaf of “amateurism” has now wholly and completely dived into Super Bowl-level excess.

It’s a good thing players are getting paid for their efforts now. Seeing this phenomenally expensive multi-day extravaganza would make even hardcore amateurism obsessives like Clemson coach Dabo Swinney think that maybe there ought to be a few bucks routed in the direction of the people who actually do the work that makes this all possible.

Oh, right. The players. They’re virtual afterthoughts in all the pregame hype, and they spent Saturday morning looking bemused by all the attention swirling around them, from media to mascots to puppies.

The CFP held its media day Saturday morning, and aside from the early hour, it was virtually indistinguishable from the NFL’s own Super Bowl week equivalent. Head coaches and star players got podiums where journalists crowded in and peppered questions; less well-known players wandered the open area in warmup suits. Questions ranged from the serious to the silly, and answers were mostly genial well-rehearsed blandness; everyone involved knows how to dance this dance.

(Notable differences between the CFP and Super Bowl media days: Certain assistants, like Ohio State’s Chip Kelly, draw a lot more spotlight in college football than they do in the NFL. The entire affair was at 9 a.m., rather than prime time. And the media were there to tell stories, rather than become the story. Expect those latter two to change very soon.)

Media day serves a significant and necessary purpose, generating reams of new content to a college football fan base hungry for every morsel of new information. But it’s also one hell of a distraction for the actual teams playing in this game, the final challenge of a months-long marathon defined by a singular focus.

“The No. 1 thing for us right now is focusing on this game. I said that to our team; we have to avoid all distractions right now,” Ohio State head coach Ryan Day said. “We have a lot of family, a lot of friends, a lot of people who certainly want to come to the game, and obviously those things need to get taken care of, but ultimately we have to do our job.”

Kelly added: “As you get moving up in these games, you go from the first round to the Rose Bowl to the Cotton Bowl, to the national championship, all of a sudden I think the distractions become bigger, and you have to learn how to deal with the distractions. Like, this media day is different than the Rose Bowl media day. And rightly so.”

As he spoke, several of his players were posing with rescue puppies, others signed autographs for rows of Buckeyes fans, and still others were edging around a 7-foot-tall “Perry the Pylon” mascot wending its way through the crowd.

“In our world, this is a Thursday because it's Saturday, but our game isn't until Monday,” Kelly continued. “So this is our Thursday mindset. What's our Thursday mindset going to be like when we get into the meeting rooms when we get back? What's our Thursday mindset going to be like when we get on the practice field today?”

Notre Dame is following a similar keep-to-the-routine path. “We have a very finite schedule that we pretty much get the whole season,” Notre Dame kicker (and Orange Bowl hero) Mitch Jeter said. “That’s what we’re doing this week as well, having the same practice schedule, meeting schedule, stuff like that.”

Beyond that, the teams have to handle their own business; there’s only so much at this point that the coaches can do to babysit their charges. And if they don’t know the stakes by now …

“Our guys are men,” Day said. “Everybody’s job with the team, and that includes coaches and staffers, is not to be a distraction to the other players as they prepare, but also avoiding distractions for yourself, [whether that’s] tickets, stories that are written, talking about previous years or previous games, or things that have nothing to do with what’s going on in this game.”

Some players said they will stay off their phones all the way until kickoff; others will wait until the hours before the game. Some will watch TV, others will lose themselves in prayer. All said they understand that the weight, the meaning, the emotion of the game can wait for later.

“We’ve put so much into this,” Ohio State linebacker (and Cotton Bowl hero) Jack Sawyer said. “There will be time to look back and reflect after the season.”

What matters now is the focus and the preparation. One last ride, without weighing themselves down with the thought that this is one last ride.

“Every single rep you’ve done,” Jeter said, “leads up to this moment.”

Or, as Notre Dame’s Jeremiyah Love summed it up: “Got to keep the main thing, the main thing.”

That will be a massive challenge considering all the fans, sponsors, officials, media and family jockeying for the players’ attention. But whichever team can manage that focus will have a massive advantage heading into kickoff. And then it’ll be up to the men on the field to generate the spectacle.