Carl Adkins was holding a football Tuesday as he took the podium to deliver a report on Super Bowl LIII.
“This morning, I got a very nice note from Peter O’Reilly, the senior vice president of events for the NFL, thanking the host committee and the city of Atlanta for doing a fantastic job,” began Adkins, the executive director of the Atlanta Super Bowl Host Committee.
Along with the note, O’Reilly sent the commemorative Super Bowl football that Adkins brought with him for his report to the Georgia World Congress Center Authority board’s monthly meeting.
Adkins also brought numbers to quantify many aspects of the Super Bowl’s visit to Atlanta. He said the host committee’s staff of 26 “put in over 100,000 hours of planning” over the course of two years and 10,000 volunteers logged a total of 250,000 hours of work in the lead-up to the big game. He said approximately 500,000 people attended Super Bowl Live (the concerts and other attractions in Centennial Olympic Park) and Super Bowl Experience (the football theme park in the Congress Center). He said local hotel occupancy was at 96 percent for the weekend of the game.
Adkins was particularly pleased with how visitors responded to the proximity of Super Bowl-related events downtown.
“I can’t say enough about the campus and how people were able to go back and forth between the events,” he said. “It’s one of the things we heard over and over again, the ‘walkability’ of the Super Bowl, which really goes to the core of our pitch to the NFL, the CFP (College Football Playoff) and the NCAA when we’re trying to get this (big-event) business.”
Adkins also discussed the NFL's late decision to briefly open Mercedes-Benz Stadium's famous retractable roof during pregame ceremonies before closing it for the Super Bowl game.
“Everything was dependent on the temperature (as to) whether or not to open the roof for pregame,” he said. Opening and closing the roof, like other aspects of the pregame ceremony, was “practiced all week long,” he said. His understanding was that the NFL didn’t want to open the roof at all on Super Bowl Sunday if the outside temperature dipped below 55 degrees. It remained a few degrees above that at kickoff.
Adkins doesn't get long to reflect on the Super Bowl. He'll shift his focus to his next assignment as executive director of the Atlanta host committee for next year's Final Four at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. (More on that soon.)
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LEADOFF LINKS
> FiveThirtyEight.com's preseason MLS forecast projects Atlanta United with a league-leading 61 points, a 90-percent chance of making the playoffs, an 18-percent chance of winning the Supporters' Shield and a 16-percent chance of repeating as MLS Cup champion. See the report here.
> Georgia Tech's athletics department will get a needed revenue boost from playing five games in Mercedes-Benz Stadium from 2020-24. See Ken Sugiura's story here and Mark Bradley's column here.
> Here, from D. Orlando Ledbetter, are five players on the Falcons' radar at the NFL scouting combine.
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