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 Bowls — 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 were here for the Super Bowl (in 2004), and I told (Houston Texans owner Bob McNair) I thought their city did a great job,” Blank said. “We can learn a lot from here.
“We’ll continue to learn what Houston is doing right. There’s an awful lot of things that we would put on that list.”
‘Haven’t slept in 15 years,’ owner quips
A reporter mentioned to Blank that it was 15 years ago this week — Feb. 2, 2002 — that NFL owners approved his purchase of the Falcons and recalled Blank saying that day he wouldn’t rest until the team won a championship.
“I haven’t slept in 15 years,” Blank quipped Friday.
The Falcons are in the Super Bowl for the first time since Blank bought the team, the second time in the franchise’s 51-year history.
"It's not an ending of a journey for us," Blank said. "You raise the bar, and you've got to continue to fight to stay up there. That's true in the world of business, and it's true in the world of sports as well."
The numbers game
70: Cameras to be used by Fox Sports for its telecast of Sunday's game
91: Microphones to be used by Fox Sports
26: Consecutive years that the Super Bowl has posted a Nielsen rating above 40.0, meaning more than 40 percent of the nation's households watched
49.1: Rating for the Super Bowl on Jan. 28, 1982, when San Francisco defeated Cincinnati 26-21, the highest rated Super Bowl in history. (Rating is the percentage of TV households watching on average.)
110.9 million: Average TV audience in the United States for the past seven Super Bowls, each delivering an audience above 100 million
114.4 million: U.S. viewers for the most watched Super Bowl ever, the 2015 game won by New England over Seattle
53%, 47%: The breakdown of male and female viewers, respectively, for the Super Bowl, compared to an audience of 64% male and 36% female for the average NFL regular-season game, according to Fox Sports
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