Those $2 hot dogs aren’t the drawing card that they were supposed to be.

The Falcons are struggling to fill their new home stadium. The venue went ridiculously over budget, and for NFL games it’s now grossly underperforming. That’s happening in large part because the team that plays there is also grossly underperforming.

Consider this photo from Dan Wolken of USA Today, taken in the middle of the first quarter when the butts-in-seats ratio should be fairly high. The crowd, at best, seems sparse.

According to the official game book, paid attendance for the Rams-Falcons game was 71,856. However, the true number of fans in attendance likely falls far short of that.

Earlier this year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution demonstrated based on public records the significant gap between announced attendance and actual attendance. For example, the announced attendance for the Falcons’ seventh home game in 2018 was 72,262. The actual attendance was 60,626. For the final home game, 72,084 actually was 56,470.

It will be interesting to see what the actual numbers were for the Rams game on Sunday. Whatever they were, thousands were missing out on those $2 hot dogs.