By MATT ROSENFELD
SPORTS EDITOR
Last Sunday was one of my favorite days of the year. After Thanksgiving and Christmas, Super Bowl Sunday is the next holiday (yes, it is a holiday) on my list. Super Bowl Sunday is very fun for a person like me. You see, I love football. A lot. It is by far my favorite sport. I follow the NFL religiously, so the day of the Super Bowl is the conclusion of it all.
Super Bowl Sunday does it for me for a few reasons, but one thing in particular stands out. It is the only day of the year where pretty much everybody turns into a football fan. Even friends that don’t necessarily like football will “come into my world,” so to speak, and enjoy the day’s festivities, culminating in a football game that the entire country is watching.
For its entire history, which is now 47 years, the Super Bowl has been played in either a warm-weather city (think New Orleans and Miami, the two most frequent Super Bowl hosts), or in the few cases the big game was held in a cold-weather city (Minneapolis, Detroit and Indianapolis), the game has been indoors.
Why am I bringing this up? Because, that will change next year when the Super Bowl takes place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ. And even though I am a proud New Jersey native, I think it is an awful idea.
Look outside, and you will still probably see remnants of the last bit of snow that hit us here in the New York metropolitan area. Think back to last week and the frigid temperatures we walked through to get to class. Now, picture the Super Bowl coverage you’ve seen. Everything is outdoors! This is a forced attempt to get the NFL’s biggest event onto the world’s biggest stage in New York, and I think it is headed for failure.
The Super Bowl is more than just a game. It is an event. It is a week of fans and tourists coming in from their team’s city to enjoy a place they have never been to and cheer on their team. New York is a great place to do that, but it is just too bad the Super Bowl happens to be played in the dead of winter. I do not think I speak for only myself when I say people will be far less inclined to spend all day outside during the week leading up to the Super Bowl when the temperature is in the mid 30s.
Then, there is the matter of game conditions. This past Sunday, the day of the Super Bowl, it was about 25 degrees at kickoff in East Rutherford. This means the game would absolutely be affected by weather conditions.
Most people argue that football games are played in adverse conditions all the time and that weather is part of what makes football great. I do concede that weather is a factor in many games, often games that mean a lot (like the 2007 NFC Championship game in which the Giants beat the Packers in Green Bay in which the game time temperature was at zero degrees). However, that does not change my stance that the league’s biggest game, its grand spectacle, should not be played in bad conditions.
The coldest Super Bowl in history was Super Bowl VI, which took place in the same place as this year’s game did, New Orleans. The game time temperature then was 39 degrees. The difference between then and now is that the Louisiana Superdome, where they played Sunday, was not built yet. Instead, the game was played outdoors at Tulane Stadium.
That was an anomaly though, as New Orleans is rarely that cold in late January-early February. The average temperature in East Rutherford in early February: 32 degrees. The Super Bowl is a game that should be played in the best, most even conditions possible. I know that Mother Nature will do as she pleases (such as Super Bowl XLI in Miami when it rained), but the NFL should be actively trying to avoid the chances of weather playing a role in the Super Bowl.
Fans going to the game don’t want to be spending the week before their team’s biggest game in the freezing cold. Fans everywhere do not want to be thinking what might have changed if the weather was not inclement.
Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco said it best last week when he told Sporting News his thoughts about a cold-weather Super Bowl.
“A lot more goes into this game than just playing the game,” Flacco said. “It’s for the fans and the players that played for the right to get there. There’s a lot of things that go into it. It’s kind of a crazy decision.”
Indeed , Joe. Indeed.