The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Tonight’s game will be a stadium first if weather permits.
Arthur Blank was thrilled to get some good news about Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s retractable roof.
“Steve (Cannon, CEO of Blank’s businesses) came to me a week or 10 days ago,” Blank said Friday, “and told me that weather permitting we could plan to open the roof (tonight). And he said, ‘We ought to just go ahead and do it.’”
The Falcons owner’s reaction: “The sooner the better.”
So, if all goes according to plan, the roof will be open for the Falcons’ first regular-season game in the new stadium.
Construction delays related to the roof, which consists of eight retractable panels that open in unison from the center, postponed the stadium’s debut about six months.
The first seven events in the stadium have been conducted with the roof closed as work proceeds on its automation.
While that work will continue through the fall, enough progress had been made for the Falcons to announce last weekend that they’ll open the roof for the nationally televised Sunday Night Football game against Green Bay — provided weather conditions are favorable, as forecasts predict.
It would be the first openair Falcons game in Atlanta since Dec. 15, 1991, the franchise’s final game at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
Blank said the plan is to open the roof this morning, long before he or the fans arrive.
The opening will take a lot longer than the ultimate goal of 12 minutes — maybe a couple of hours, maybe more.
The time has gradually come down as eight test moves have been completed and adjustments have been made.
“The roof works fine now,” Blank said. “It just doesn’t work in the time period we had planned on — under 12 minutes. It will. But we got comfortable opening and closing it a number of times.”
He said he watched part of one “very slow” move of the roof.
Some day, stadium officials plan to make a public show of opening the roof. But that will be after it’s up to speed.
For now, it’s best shown on time-lapse video, as NBC likely will do during the Falcons-Packers telecast.
While retractable roofs on other NFL stadiums have two moving pieces, Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s eight are four sizes and must move at slightly different speeds because they cover slightly different distances. The panels, called petals, weigh about 500 tons each.
Blank has long said the Falcons want to play as many home games as possible under an open roof. He reiterated Friday that over the long haul the Falcons intend to buck the trend of the NFL’s other teams with retractable-roof stadiums: Collectively, those four teams play with the roofs open in only about one-third of home games.
“We studied weather patterns for Atlanta, and we would project that normally seven or eight NFL games out of 10 could be open-roof here,” Blank said. “This building was designed to be an open-air building we could close as opposed to a closed building that can be opened up.
“We think this building ... will do really well in its open state. And we are happy to do it (tonight).”
The roof was closed Friday as Blank and a reporter sat in two of the stadium’s 71,000-plus seats for this interview.
Blank savored the view of the otherwise empty stadium.
“It’s nice to sit here and watch the quietness in the building,” he said, eating a pretzel.
About that time, he spilled some of his soft drink.
“Nice floors. Got to keep them clean, right?” said Blank, bending over to wipe up the spilled soda with a napkin. “The owner is cleaning up the floors.”
So it’s not just the roof on his mind.