The feeling around the house is that the people with tickets to the Super Bowl have it too easy. The game should be held outdoors in the most unpleasant weather possible. That way, celebrities and corporate fat cats won't want to attend and hardcore fans will have the chance to live their dreams of shrivering. Based on my brief research, Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta seems to be the ideal candidate. Other suggestions?
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Next Year in Edmonton
04 Feb 2007 11:19 pm
Comments (21)
Great idea! My mom was saying she felt sorry for the fans being rained on today, and I was thinking to myself how could anyone feel bad for people who are willing and able to shell out thousands to see one football games?
I was just commenting that that game would have been so much better at Lambeau Field, but Commonwealth Stadium would work, too. Football is just better in horrendous weather.
Yeah, so it rained the whole game in Miami. But did any player get even a speck of mud on him? By the end of that thing, in an honest world, we shouldn't have been able to tell one brown-caked team from the other.
Another option is the Canad Inns Stadium in Winnipeg, home of the Blue Bombers. We don't call it "Winterpeg" for nothing.
Or maybe a soccer stadium in Siberia.
Here's the weather advisory for Buffalo, NY tomorrow:
WEST WINDS OF 15 TO 30 MPH WILL COMBINE WITH TEMPERATURES IN THE SINGLE DIGITS TO NEAR ZERO TO CREATE WIND CHILL VALUES AROUND 20 BELOW ZERO OVERNIGHT THROUGH TUESDAY. THIS IS THE COLDEST WEATHER WE HAVE SEEN IN TWO YEARS. TAKE PRECAUTIONS. SCHOOL CHILDREN SHOULD BE DRESSED APPROPRIATELY.
Ralph Wilson Stadium has miserable enough conditions in February that we don't really need to leave the country.
It's called the Lombardi Trophy; why not just play it in Lambeau every year?
If I believed in God, I would think that She was constantly giving Buffalo a hint with its shitty weather.
I was stoked that it rained. No if they could only figure out a way to make sure everyone who got a ticket was a hardcore fan of one of the teams. Some sort of loyalty oath.
When the Chargers went to the Super Bowl in 1994, I would have done anything to get tickets (in retrospect, not so much), and I heard Rush on the radio talking about how he didn't know if he wanted to go or not, he might he might not. Who knows? At that moment, my love for football was permanently kicked down a few notches.
"It's called the Lombardi Trophy; why not just play it in Lambeau every year?"
Becuase this would obviously be a more apropos location for the game...
Michigan Stadium - 114,000 fans on wooden benches with no luxury boxes or advertising. Though, they are adding luxury boxes soon.
Seriously, they ought to take a page from the senior sport, and have the SB in the home town of the team with the better record. Like the rest of the playoffs. Season ticket holders of each team getting priority. It would be uncertain where the game would be until just two weeks before, which ought to keep out a certain percentage of riff-raff.
charleycarp beats me to it, and not just because it keeps out a certain percentage of the riff-raff, but because football is better in actual outdoor conditions and not on a stage set.
Yeah, that would be better. The NFL would also do well to ban domes and artificial turf. And gloves.
Based on my brief research, Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta seems to be the ideal candidate.
That's silly. The field would be 10 yards too long!
Cleveland
I'm a Colts fan, and I know they play in a dome, but the consensus among my friends and I is that they should have just had the Super Bowl at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend. It's big enough to hold a Super Bowl crowd, reasonably close to being "neutral ground" (in Indiana, but in a part of the state with much more Bears than Colts fans) and the weather there would certainly have kept away non-fans. :-)
The people who put the grass in Dolphin Stadium deserve the Nobel Prize for Lawn Maintenance. A steady rain, 300+ lb guys digging in and running into each other, and the field held up very well. I thought for a while they were playing on artificial turf, until I noticed the grass and dirt being kicked up on one slow motion replay.
The real reason why Alberta isn't a good choice should be apparent to anyone who remembers the Calgary winter olympics of some years back - they were largely a flop because of the Chinook, a warm wind that turns up sometimes in western Canada and that almost ruined all of the outdoor events that year.
According to Weather.com, yesterday, between 6 and 10 EST, in South Bend it was between 1 and 3 degrees F (felt like between -14 and -17), with snow falling. During the same period in Edmonton, it was 12 degrees F (felt like between 4 and 12), and cloudy with light snow.
Sounds worse in South Bend than Edmonton yesterday.
Candlestick. For shits and giggles.
I loved seeing the rain: after years of picking 'sunny' locations and domes -- yeah, go north for once, and choose a fricking dome in Detroit -- the weather conspired to have the culmination of a winter game's season... played in wintry conditions.
And yes, fair play to the groundskeepers.
Speaking as an Edmontonian (I know, what are the chances?) the stadium isn't the size of the NFL standard, and is pretty poor on the amenities, but that would be awesome. (Then again, with our weather luck it'd be a balmy 15C and sunny.)
Oh, and, to answer The Navigator, we're about 3 1/2 hours from the mountains, so a chinook isn't even the remotest possibility. (As much as these guys would have wished it.)
Comments closed February 18, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Or just recognize that the Grey Cup is the real North American football championship...
Posted by Scott Lemieux | February 4, 2007 11:24 PM