It’s much harder than people think to convert a stadium from one sport to another; it’s a very significant engineering challenge.
In an amusing reversal, for isntance, the Blue Jays recently decided to make some modifications to their stadium to make it more baseball-friendly, including replacing the artificial turf with grass… and informed Toronto’s CFL team that as of 2017 they’re homeless. Sorry, it’s a baseball stadium, no football for you. As they obviously make money renting the place out for football games and selling food and souvenirs, it says something that they decided it wasn’t worth all that money to bother keeping the stadium suitable for both sports.
I don’t think being prepared for a worst-case scenario is bad, but many people (including me) were suggesting the NFL move the game to Saturday because of the forecast. The forecast was wrong. Forecasts are almost always wrong these days, and they are rarely wrong in the negative extreme.
Someone said in this thread i believe that most forecasts are now giving the worst possible case for the public welfare. Is that true? It sounds plausible. Heaven forbid you predict something and it is wrong in the opposite direction. Because people would remember if you predicted one inch of snow and you got 10 inches. Or if the temp was predicted to be 3 above, and it turned out to be -15 below. But forecasting should be more than just worst-case scenarios.
Do you need to hear from a weather forecaster that you need to be prepared for bitterly cold temps to sit outside in Green Bay Wisc. for a football game? Or are you going to dress appropriately because you are an adult with an IQ higher than a turnip?
I think you’re phrasing that in a somewhat leading fashion. If Green Bay Wisc is usually around 5 degrees F, which is REALLY DAMN COLD, and is FAR BELOW FREEZING, then it’s a bit silly to have a lot of hysterical warnings telling people “hey, it will be below freezing, better wear a heavy coat, eh?” because it’s going to be 5 degrees F. If, on the other hand, it’s there’s some chance it’s going to be -40 degrees F, and people are expecting and preparing for 5 degrees F, it’s not just a good idea but I’d say damn near a responsibility for forecasters to make clear to the public what they need to prepare for, even if saying “hey, prepare for extreme cold” seems on the surface redundant.
While I’m sure RickJay is right about the converting a stadium from baseball configuration to football isn’t a trifling thing, I note that Yankee Stadium, the SF Giants stadium and the Arizona Diamondbacks’ stadium have all hosted college football bowl games without an inordinate amount of apparent difficulty.
Those are laid out with it in mind. It’s a case by case thing. New Yankee Stadium, though made primarily for baseball, was deliberately built to emulate the proportions and dimensions of its predecessor field, and so it can fit the college football games just as easily – but some other ballparks are too optimized and it may be geometrically plausible to lay down a regulation gridiron but then you’ll have a large % of your seats pointing in the wrong direction and the sideline spaces all wonky. Plus the newer baseball-optimized stadiums have deliberately lower seating capacity: Lambeau can take nearly double the number of people as Miller Park.