Kudos to the NFL for weathering this storm
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Finally, the NFL has come to its senses and ditched the antiquated concept of playing the Super Bowl in one of only four cities each year.
League owners made history Tuesday when they voted for East Rutherford, N.J., to host Super Bowl XLVIII – that’s the one being played in 2014, for those of you who don’t know your Roman Numerals – at the new $1.6 billion Meadowlands Stadium, which will become the home of the New York Giants and Jets beginning next season.
This is something that should’ve happened years ago, but the league has always dragged its feet in fear that the biggest sporting event in the world could be played in less-than-ideal conditions if they moved the Super Bowl anywhere other than Tampa, Miami or Arizona.
Honestly, what’s the worst that could happen? Snow? No interactive Fanzone outside of the stadium? I don’t care if your 14-year-old nephew from Poughkeepsie doesn’t get a chance to throw a football through a life-size cutout of Lynn Swann. The pre-game fanfare is for those in attendance, which probably represents less than two percent of the American population. Most of us park our fat rear-ends on the couch on Super Bowl Sunday, so why should we care whether it snows, sleets, hails or rains acid from the sky?
With the league finally rolling the dice and putting its annual showcase in a legit, cold-weather city, we’ve got one more factor to keep an eye on during the two weeks of nauseating pre-game coverage. At this point, weather talk would be a welcome diversion from the usual clichéd stories and subplots. Truth be told, the Super Bowl has become way too robotic being played on neatly-trimmed turf each year with little to no resistance from the outside elements. Other than Super Bowl XLI three years ago in Miami in which a heavy downpour left the field a sloppy, muddy mess, the conditions are always ideal – so ideal that some of these games lack an identity.
Furthermore, putting the Super Bowl in a warm-weather city every year makes no sense considering some of the NFL’s greatest games were played in horrible conditions. The 1967 NFL championship game between Green Bay and Dallas is affectionately known as the “Ice Bowl” because of the minus-13 degree temperature at Lambeau Field. And without crappy weather at Foxboro Stadium during the 2001 playoffs, we would have never found out what the tuck rule was. The moment that rewrote New England Patriots history might not have occurred were it not for snow, so why rob another team of an opportunity to carve its own legacy on a frozen field?
And let’s not get ahead of ourselves with weather predictions either. Meteorologists can’t tell us what will happen four days from now, let alone four years. And if Al Gore’s global warming theory is realer than we thought, it could be 71 and sunny in New Jersey by the time February of 2014 rolls around. Heck, the entire state might snap off the mainland and float out into the Atlantic Ocean by then. I could be a millionaire. A lot of weird stuff might happen.
The point is there’s no reason to panic based on Tuesday’s historic announcement. If anything, we should embrace the NFL’s progressive thinking and praise the owners for being willing to embrace change, even if that “change” is more or less a return to normalcy.
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