The last college game played in the Georgia Dome came on Dec. 31, 2016 when Alabama defeated Washington 24-7 in the Peach Bowl.
Alabama played 13 games in the Dome, and posted an 11-2 record. Now the dome is retired, making way for Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
“We’re trying to truly look at this differently,” Falcons CEO and president Rich McKay said at SEC Media days earlier this summer. “The Georgia Dome was our home and your home, the SEC Championship for a long time. We didn’t want to build a better Georgia Dome. We wanted to change the game and do it for a long time.”
Changing the game is exactly what McKay is doing. Mercedes-Benz Stadium has only one permanent sign – the Mercedes-Benz logo. Every other sign in the stadium is LED for a grand total of 83,000 square feet, which is 78,200 more square feet than the Georgia Dome.
“In our mind we wanted tenants that were going to come in here and play to feel like this was their home field, this was their stadium, and that’s how we designed it,” McKay said.
Food pricing is also changing. Families will now be able to eat for just $28. The most expensive item on the menu – a $6 chicken finger basket. Regular and Souvenir soda comes with unlimited refills. Restaurants inside the stadium will also not have markup charges.
“We have to get to the point where fans come to our stadiums and actually get a bargain and feel treated with respect when it comes to food, and we think in the stadium game that has not gone the way we think it should,” McKay said.
Videos of the stadium have been playing on social media, most notably the Halo Board.
The Halo Board is 1,100 feet long and wraps around the field. Standing up, it is the taller than the Bank of America building, which is the tallest building in Atlanta.
However, coach Nick Saban is preparing his team to focus on the game not just the new stadium.
“We’re going to go over there on Friday, which we usually don’t do,” he said. “We played in Dallas twice, well, really three times, which is the same kind of an awesome place. We took the players over and let them walk around and do their gawking on Friday. Hopefully when the game comes up, they’ll be focused on the game. I think mature competitors that have been in situations like this before handle this a lot better than young players, but hopefully our young players will show the maturity to be able to handle it as well.”
But the players are still excited to open in Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
“It’s pretty cool. I get to go home and it’s not that far from my family – which is nice,” tight end Miller Forristall said. “I grew up watching the Falcons play in the Georgia Dome, watching the SEC Championship, and now we get to be one of the first teams to play in the new dome. That’s pretty cool.”
The new stadium is only 83 feet away from its predecessor, the only separating variable a Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) tunnel.
“When we do the implosion in November, we all want to watch that implosion because it’s going to be close to our building for sure,” McKay said.
