Good morning. LEADOFF has the early buzz in Atlanta sports.
We got a tour of Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Wednesday and immediately realized a lot had changed since our last time in the building.
There’s a lot more steel in the roof, for one thing — now 34 million pounds of it.
But aside from the much-discussed roof, here are three other things that caught our attention in the new Falcons stadium:
1. A 100-foot tall column in one corner is in the process of being wrapped on three sides in LED video board. The mega-column will be visible from throughout the stadium during games and other events. The vertical, three-dimensional video presentation should be dramatic — and different.
2. Concrete has been poured for a massive exterior plaza on the stadium's northeast side. The 61,000-square-foot plaza, designed as a gathering place for fans, is outdoors but within the stadium's ticketed area. The plan is to activate the space, which features views of the downtown skyline, with pregame and postgame entertainment.
3. A lightweight, translucent plastic material known as ETFE is being installed on much of the exterior walls. This is designed to bring natural light into the concourses and seating bowl, a contrast to the Georgia Dome.
The tour followed an event in which the Falcons organization marked a construction milestone. One of the final steel beams for the fixed portion of the stadium roof was ceremoniously lifted into position as media members watched. Construction workers signed the beam before it was hoisted by crane and bolted into place almost 300 feet above what will be the playing field.
Still to come: installation of the retractable portion of the roof. That will add another 7 million pounds of steel.
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CoachesHotSeat.com has taken note of Georgia's Kirby Smart and Georgia Tech's Paul Johnson, both of whom have teams with 4-3 records.
In the website's current compilation of college football coaches whose job performance is under fire, Smart is ranked on Hot Seat No. 10 and Johnson on Hot Seat No. 16.
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Falcons owner Arthur Blank weighed in on this season's decline in NFL television ratings, discussing the issue with USA Today at league meetings in Houston this week:
Credit: Bob Leverone
Credit: Bob Leverone
“It’s a very muddied water right now because you’ve got obviously the (presidential) debates going on and you have the Donald Trump show,” Blank said. “That’s a lot of commotion right now. It’s pretty hard to figure out right now what’s real and what’s not.”
But the NFL must figure it out, Blank suggested in the interview.
“The ratings thing, we can’t ignore,” he said.
“What’s going up? Where is the softness? How do you respond to that? It’s no different from my days running The Home Depot, when we had markets where we didn’t get the response. We had to figure out why aren’t we getting customers in our stores here. It didn’t happen very often, but sometimes it happens.”
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