Don’t be silly. Green Bay doesn’t have the hotels to support a Super Bowl crowd. The usual visiting team hotel is actually 30 miles down the highway in Appleton.
Lest anyone think the Packers would have an advantage in the cold of the Meadowlands, the Packers were generally lousy in severe cold in the playoffs after 1998.
What’s the hotel and air travel capacity for Green Bay? It’s jack shit. No way there is ever a super bowl in Green Bay, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Pittsburgh. Might see them now in Chicago and Boston.
If you want to have weather as an advantage/disadvantage, then make it a home and home two game series.
I can’t wait to see the old rock and roll performers suffering in a -30 wind chill.
This is just wrong. Heavy rain here is predictably between May - August. You can get hurricanes in South Florida between June and November. In late January/early February it doesn’t happen. February here can be relatively cold, but you have a much better chance of mild to good weather than in New Jersey. There is almost no chance of snow. There are lots of hotels, beaches, decent restaurants and good strip clubs. That’s why the Super Bowl is often here, in New Orleans, San Diego, Miami or Pasadena. We’re all built for winter tourism.
Where will the Sports Writers play golf on the days leading up to the Super Bowl? Winged Foot? Bethpage? Pine Valley?
I think Cincinnati could do it, due to its unique position essentially at the apex of three states, the fact that the stadium is in the city proper and there’s tons of hotels/motels and lots of interstate within a reasonable driving radius. PBS may be too small, though. IIRC its capacity is only about 65,000.
As I suspected, which is why I asked the question. Although you could still easily have a game in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Buffalo or Foxborough – they probably all have at least as much hotel space as Jacksonville did.
I grew up <5 miles down the road from Gillette Stadum (nee Foxboro Stadium/Sullivan Stadium/Shaefer Stadium). Not a lot of big hotels nearby but Boston and Providence are both within 30 minutes.
I think watching football while there’s snow coming down is highly entertaining. I’m sure the True Fans will know how to handle it. As for the players, I’m not weeping. They have enough money for mansions, diamonds in their teeth, dope, and groupies, they can buy themselves some thermal underwear to wear a couple of hours.
Why would the size of their Public TV station matter?
I like how most of the people in favor of the decision in this thread are Giants fans, and most of the detractors seem to be bittercakes about the Northeast being the media capital of the country.
For my two cents, the cold and snow is irrelevant compared to the wind. Not sure how the wind will be at the New Meadowlands, but if it’s like Giants Stadium it could seriously derail the passing game. (The wind gets progressively worse as it gets later in the football season.)
I guess if you think that passing offense is the central art of football, yeah, this move sucks. If you see it as just one of many equal aspects, it’s no big deal.
For everyone who argues that bad weather can’t hurt a game – not that anyone here has – I would point out the inaugural London game between the Giants and Dolphins. Bad field conditions due to weather made that game an unwatchable trainwreck. (My team won and I thought that game sucked balls.) That was just from a bad surface, though.
To see what wind can do late in the season at the Meadowlands, check this game out. The winning quarterback completed 8 passes all game. The two quarterbacks (including that year’s Superbowl MVP) went a combined 26 of 78. Yep, that’s 52 incomplete passes thrown. This was even suckier to watch than the London game, and not just because my team lost. This game sucked.
Anyway, I’m excited for it. Catering to dome teams in the Superbowl has always felt wrong to me.
I found this page on minimum requirements for hosting the Super Bowl (no idea if it’s entirely accurate):
Obviously, the NFL just ignored factor #1 on this list by selecting the Meadowlands.
Lambeau Field does now have sufficient seating (70,000 seems to be the minimum; after the last renovation, Lambeau seats nearly 73,000), but, yeah, the lack of hotel rooms would be a killer. You’d have people staying in Milwaukee (nearly 2 hours away), and that’d never fly. I’m also not convinced that Green Bay would have enough indoor “convention / exhibition” space for the rest of the hoopla; nor would there likely be an appropriate practice space nearby for a second team.
Chicago would certainly have enough hotel space; Foxboro likely would, as well, since both Boston and Providence are within 30 miles. I’m not sure that mid-sized, non-tourist cities like Buffalo and Pittsburgh would have enough (if memory serves, Jacksonville used several cruise ships to supplement their hotel room base for the Super Bowl).
Paul Brown Stadium. 
This is just plain wrong. The next stadium built will probably be the 49ers new stadium, hopefully in Santa Clara. It will have no roof. Even if that plan fall through, there will definitely not be a roof on any football stadium built for them.
Likewise, the proposed new stadium in LA will be open, as was the stalled plan for the San Diego Chargers.
I wonder if that would leave Seattle out. Capacity at Qwest Field is 67,000.
The craziest thing is that from what I read, the Giants wanted a dome but the Jets flat-out refused and held their ground. I never could wrap my head around that. What the fuck, Giants ownership?!
What’s your judgment going to be based on? The weather? The teams? The officials? The halftime show?
If you’re concerned that the weather is going to negatively influence the game too much, I say … tough shit. It’s fucking football. Weather and lack of it, effects games during the season too. Unless you want to make every single game played at 72 degrees with no wind or rain, the Super Bowl should be no different. Good teams should be able to adjust and if they can’t … well, fuck em. They shouldn’t be there anyway.
I hate the fact the reason they did it was to fellate the East Coast, but I like the idea of an outdoor game for the Super Bowl just as much as I like it during the season.
If someone else was paying for your car, you’d want all the options, wouldn’t you?
It might. It looks like Seattle’s average high temperature in February is 50, but the January average is only 46.
Even when Seattle had the Kingdome, they never hosted a Super Bowl – I’m not certain if they ever even seriously campaigned to host one. As the Kingdome only held 66,000 for football, it was probably deemed too small (though I don’t know if the 70,000 minimum has always been there – San Diego hosted SBXXII in 1988, and it looks like it held less than 70K at that time).
I suspect that, if the Seattle folks felt that Seattle had a reasonable shot at hosting a Super Bowl, they would have built enough capacity into Qwest Field.
Seattle put in a bid to host Super Bowl XXVI. If I remember correctly, it had already been decided to hold it in a northern city with a dome. (According to Wikipedia, Indianapolis and Detroit also had failed bids.) The game was awarded to Minneapolis. The Metrodome’s capacity for football is only 64,111.
It looks like the 70K minimum must be fairly recent, then. It appears that San Diego expanded Jack Murphy / Qualcomm to over 70K for SB XXXII in '98.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the NFL “helping” the two New York teams pay for this new stadium in some way, like generating excessive interest, prospective investorships, etc.
