than inside a dome. At the time it was planned to retain the Georgia Dome to continue hosting non-NFL events. In justifying the need for a new venue, Falcons CEO and president Rich McKay said that the Georgia Dome “was a really functional building that served its purpose very well. We did not want to build a better Georgia Dome. That was not the object. If we would have done that, we would have renovated the Georgia Dome. We really wanted to change the game and do it for a long, long time.” Stadium general manager Scott Jenkins described the new stadium's advantages over the Dome, saying "The LED displays we have, whether it’s every seat is two-inches wider than the Georgia Dome, almost all the concourses connect so you can circumnavigate the building, you don’t get cut-off. You can move vertically throughout the building, we have really wide staircases, we have twice the elevators, twice the escalators compared to the Georgia Dome". McKay said of it, "The architecture, I think, speaks for itself. I hope the first time you're in it, yeah, you're wowed by the architecture, but more wowed by the fan experience." SB Nation noted that while the "Georgia Dome did its job for 24 years...it wasn’t anything special. That’s not the case with [the Mercedes-Benz Stadium]. Walking up to it feels like you’re approaching a darn spaceship". The new stadium, which would be known as Mercedes-Benz Stadium, received approval from the city of Atlanta, Fulton County, and Georgia state governments in 2013. Construction commenced and ground was broken in 2014. The Falcons' final game in the Dome was the 2016 NFC Championship Game on January 22, 2017, with a 44–21 victory over the Green Bay Packers, that sent the Falcons to their second Super Bowl appearance in franchise history. The stadium's final public event took place on March 4 and 5, 2017 with back-to-back Monster Jam shows. Demolition Shortly after the Georgia Dome's closing, a group presented a petition to the governor's office to save the stadium from demolition, arguing that it was still in good condition and that its loss would be wasteful. While the Falcons initially sought an open-air stadium to complement the Georgia Dome, GWCCA officials ultimately concluded that maintaining two 70,000-seat stadiums was not financially feasible, and the Georgia Dome's fate was already sealed when Mercedes-Benz Stadium was approved in 2013. Demolition