Falcons

Mercedes-Benz Stadium seats 71,000 for football and can be pushed to 75,000, and its retractable roof of overlapping glass panels has become the thing most visitors mention before they mention the game. The Falcons moved there in 2017, after sixteen years at the Georgia Dome and a quarter-century before that at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium.

Rankin M. Smith Sr. paid $8.5 million for the franchise and got it onto the field in 1966. The Smith family kept it until 2002, when Arthur Blank, who had built Home Depot, bought the club and has owned it since.

Two runs to the Super Bowl mark the club's history, and both ended the same way: a loss. The first came after the 1998 season, when Atlanta fell to the Denver Broncos, and the second after the 2016 season, when New England beat them in overtime having trailed by 25 points — a collapse that still shadows the franchise more than the run that produced it. That 1998 team gave the club its nickname: running back Jamal Anderson's touchdown celebration, the Dirty Bird, stuck to the whole side. Matt Ryan, the franchise's career passer, won his MVP award in that 2016 season, and it was Julio Jones's sideline catch in the NFC Championship game that put them into the Super Bowl in the first place.

Six division titles sit in the record book, four of them NFC South crowns won since the division's realignment, and the rivalry with New Orleans from that same division is the one supporters bring up first. Carolina and Tampa Bay fill out the rest of a division the Falcons have shared since its creation.

The stadium sits downtown, close enough to the old Georgia Dome site that longtime fans can point to where they used to park, in a city that has now watched this club play under three different roofs.