Atlanta ready for Super Bowl LIII
By Mark Carman
Atlanta Falcons President and CEO Rich McKay confirms Atlanta is ready for Super Bowl 53 and that the NFL needs to look at improving instant replay, along with the catch rule.
The countdown is on for Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta at the now one-year-old Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Falcons president and CEO Rich McKay is confident the event will go well.
“We are ready to roll,” McKay confirmed. “The college football championship was here just a few weeks ago, and our host committee has been working for the past 18 months. We are a city that is built for these kind of events. Our airport is one of the busiest in the country, we have mass transit and there are10,000 hotel rooms within a half mile of the stadium. We are a walkable big event.”
For those in attendance at Super Bowl LIII, the ticket prices will be high, but the concession prices low. In an effort to be more fan-friendly, Mercedes-Benz Stadium has implemented the lowest concession prices in the NFL. A classic hot dog, bottomless coke, popcorn, pretzel or bottle of water will each cost you just $2.00. A cheeseburger or 12-ounce beer are five bucks apiece.
“It really started with the fans,” McKay explained. “They were the ones who kept telling us, Here is what we don’t like. The number one thing they complained about was food. We went back to a concept: why wouldn’t we charge on the inside what they can get on the outside? Let’s make the food experience part of the benefit of going to the game.”
Since making the price adjustments on concessions, the Falcons have seen a huge difference in the way fans consume stadium food.
“We are selling the same volume of food at the end of the first quarter [that] we sold the entire game at the Georgia Dome,” McKay revealed. “We said to our fans, ‘What restaurants do you like in town? Give us a pizza, give us a barbecue or any other place you like.’ We went out to the top-rated restaurants and said, ‘You can come into our stadium, we will not charge you, you can bring your food, but it has to be the same product at the same price.'”
McKay also serves on the NFL’s competition committee. His loyalty to the fans extends to feeling the pain when teams leave cities for seemingly greener pastures.
“Relocation to me has always been problematic,” McKay lamented. “I am not comfortable with a fan base that invests not just money, but their emotional tie to a team, franchise and logo and then all of a sudden that team leaves.”
McKay confirmed the competition committee will look at the NFL’s catch rule in great detail once again this offseason. The committee is especially focused on the way the rule, paired with replay, slows down the game.
“Replay should not be breaking the momentum of a game,” McKay emphasized. “As far as the catch rule, we keep adding language to the rule to deal with replay. The on-field officiating of this rule is very good. But in replay we have 4k, 8k, 20k going to 50k,” McKay explained, referring to playback speed. “You can see anything you want you can slow it down so much. We have to look at that and make sure we are not having replay ruin plays it was not designed to have an impact on.”
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Super Bowl LIII is less than one year away, and fans who may be lucky enough to attend already have two things to look forward to. The food will be priced favorably, and perhaps the game will be more efficient with better rules in place.