We were wondering, what happens if the Cardinal’s (or the Steeler’s) corporate jet crashes en route to the Superbowl, killing or injuring most of the players? Is there some sort of established protocol for this for the Superbowl? Or, for that matter, significant games in general?
What would you do if you were in charge? Cancel the game? Refund the tickets? Bring in Baltimore or the Eagles? Just show the half time progam and the commercials?
Well, I was assuming that, of course. I was thinking more along the lines of the sheer logistics of dealing with all the fans, the press parties, etc. I was hoping someone had ideas on contingency planning.
Don’t have a factual answer, but my guess is that it would be such a travesty (anytime a fatal plane crash occurs with regular civilians, it’s the news story of the month), that the super bowl would be canceled, and replaced with plenty of footage of why every person on that plane was an AMERICAN HERO. And some right wing nutcase would demand that the NFL be shut down so that this can never happen again.
Major league sports have a disaster draft (or something with a more euphemistic name) to restock a team after something like a plane crash, but generally that wouldn’t kick in until the off-season.
Unthinkable as it seems, I suspect they’d have to cancel the Super Bowl.
They’d play- Ben Rothlisberger would be the alltime designated QB. He would have to promise to try equally hard for both teams. The surviving player from the crash, whoever’s in a wheelchair, would play and wouldn’t allowed to be touched, but he will be given the ball and will wheel himself to a touchdown, everyone cries. Cut to commercial, Eli and Peyton Manning licking Oreos.
He would also claim it was a terrorist atack :rolleyes:
Other than that this is probably dead on. With so many famous people dying on the same plane, it would be a pretty big tragedy. It’d be hard to conceive of them simply upjumping the one of the second-place teams just to have a super bowl, they’d go on for weeks about the tragedy etc etc
In 2002, it required a major effort to move the Super Bowl one week after the NFL season was postponed one week after Sept. 11. However, I do think the Eagles would be drafted to fill in for the Cardinals after a one week delay. Tampa isn’t quite the convention center that pre-Katrina New Orleans was so I imagine they could work something out. I think the NFL would quickly toss another Super Bowl hosting year to Phoenix to ‘compensate’
Meh. If you read sports message boards you’ll find little distrust of government in this regard - but lots of distrust in Vegas and other less legitimate gamblers.
They exploded after the regular season Steelers-Chargers game this year - millions of people really believed (and still do) that the fix was in.