Besides the Seattle Seahawks, there’s another big winner from Sunday’s Super Bowl, namely the National Football League.
The NFL always wins on Super Sunday, but the league really struck it big this year, because they were able to stage their championship game outdoors in a Northeastern city without a wintry blast from Mother Nature. When the New York metropolitan area was announced four years ago as the site of this year’s game, concerns rightly went up from far and wide that the biggest single annual date on the American sports calendar could be marred by the kind of cold, ice and snow that often hits the Northeast this time of year. While the Super Bowl has been staged in such Northern climes as Minneapolis and Detroit, those games were played in domed stadiums, where the elements didn’t play a role in the game’s outcome. But the NFL’s ownership brushed those concerns aside, gambling that the weather would not be a factor.
We know now that there were no adverse conditions for Sunday, but the revisionist narrative is already being written all across the Northeast and it goes something like this:
See, you can have a Super Bowl in an outdoor stadium on the East Coast and things will work out just fine. If they can do it in New York, we can do it in fill in the blank of your favorite I-95 corridor city.
Supposedly, Philadelphia Eagles ownership is putting together a bid for a future Big Game. And the owners of the Washington team, and yes, our own Ravens will certainly want to host a Super Bowl in the not too distant future, because New York was able to pull it off.
That kind of thinking is akin to winning a few hands in an Atlantic City casino and actually believing that you can consistently beat the house.
It’s true that football, more than our other major sports, is a game that defies the elements. It’s been played in driving rain storms, London-style fog, in triple-degree temperatures and in bitter cold. But at a time when the welfare of players is allegedly the highest priority in the NFL, how can league owners and officials ask them to place their safety in jeopardy in the highest profile game of the year? Though images of falling snow might have made for a pretty tableau for television, frozen precipitation Sunday would have sharply reduced the quality of the game. And lest you think this is needless worry, you should recall four years ago during Super Weekend, when the East Coast, including New York and Baltimore, got a two-foot blanket of snow.
How good would a Super Bowl played in that have looked and how long would it have taken for conditions to have returned to playable for players and safe for fans?
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wouldn’t rule out returning to an outdoor venue in a cold weather city in a press conference last weekend, but he should.
As anyone knows, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.