HOUSTON — Good morning. This is Leadoff, the early buzz in Atlanta sports, Super Bowl edition.
Atlanta's host committee for the 2019 Super Bowl spent about 10 hours Friday getting an NFL-organized, behind-the-scenes look at how Houston is staging the mega-event.
The take-away from the long day of meetings and tours?
“One, I think, is that we can’t start soon enough,” said Brett Daniels, the newly hired chief operating officer of the Metro Atlanta Host Committee. “Saying ‘it’s two years away, we can do that a little bit later’ — that’s not going to be reality.
“We’re going to have to dive into this when we get back into town on Tuesday and really start planning and preparing.”
The 12 representatives of Atlanta’s 2019 host committee in Houston will attend the Falcons-Patriots game on Sunday, but already they have seen the enormity of the Super Bowl spectacle.
“Super Bowl Live,” an outdoor fan festival in downtown Houston, and “NFL Experience,” an indoor football theme park in the downtown convention center, are expected to draw as many as 1 million people over their nine-day runs. The sprawling media center accommodates 5,000 credentialed journalists. A volunteer force of 10,000 has been deployed.
The Super Bowl has permeated downtown Houston all week.
“It’s a massive undertaking,” Daniels said of hosting the event.
The NFL conducted Friday’s series of meetings and venue tours for the host committees of the next three Super Bowl sites — Minneapolis in 2018, Atlanta in 2019 and Miami in 2020.
“It was real informative for us,” Daniels said.
It’s an important exercise because many features of this Super Bowl, including NFL Experience, Super Bowl Live and countless corporate hospitality events, will follow the game to its future sites.
“I think the interesting thing is you’re taking puzzle pieces from the league to build the greatest sporting event in America by fitting those pieces into your city,” said Daniels, a former long-time Dallas Cowboys executive who resigned as a deputy athletic director at Georgia Tech to join the host committee staff.
“Each city is unique. Houston has got a great downtown, and the stadium is about 20 minutes (about eight miles) away from that core area. The nice thing about Atlanta is everything being downtown in a walkable district where fans can stay in the hotels, get over to Centennial Olympic Park, hit the World Congress Center, and then right on into Mercedes-Benz Stadium for game day. That whole downtown will become our campus, which will probably help a lot with the transportation.”
Atlanta host committee representatives in Houston include Atlanta Sports Council President Dan Corso, committee executive director Carl Adkins, Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau President and CEO William Pate, Georgia World Congress Center Authority executive director Frank Poe, Mercedes-Benz Stadium general manager Scott Jenkins and others.
Atlanta was awarded the 2019 Super Bowl in a vote of NFL owners last May. It will the city’s third Super Bowl, the first since 2000.
Falcons owner Arthur Blank said there is much to be learned from Houston’s Super Bowl operations.
“We’ll continue to learn what Houston is doing right,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of things that we would put on that list.”
* * *
In a pre-Super Bowl briefing with reporters Friday, Blank recapped the escalating cost of Mercedes-Benz Stadium, now set at $1.5 billion.
“We started out with a cartoon number of about $1 billion,” Blank said. “We ended up at $1.2 billion. It grew to $1.4 billion.”
Then $1.5 billion.
Blank said the increases were “primarily due to scope changes” in what was being built.
“We’re not a good organization and I’m not a good owner at saying no to good ideas,” Blank said. “The longer it took to assemble the real estate and develop all of our construction documents, our architects and our internal team came up with a lot of good ideas that were responsive to what fans were looking for. So we felt the need to say yes.”
The stadium is slated to open this summer.
* * *
Malcolm Mitchell may have to write another book.
This season has been quite a story for the New England Patriots’ rookie wide receiver, who famously authored a children’s book while playing for the Georgia Bulldogs.
The latest chapter in Mitchell’s football career: He is drafted in the fourth round after an injury-interrupted college career, immediately becomes a reliable contributor to the Patriots’ offense, draws high praise from legendary quarterback Tom Brady and now caps his first season of pro football in the Super Bowl.
“To have this experience as a rookie is like a dream,” Mitchell said. “You know most people work their whole career to get to this point, and sometimes it never happens. And I’m fortunate enough to be here on my first year.”
Click here for the full story on Mitchell.
About the Author
