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NY Super Bowl Frenzy Begins

Posted Feb 27, 2010 by Ira Kaufman

Updated Feb 27, 2010 at 12:58 PM

By IRA KAUFMAN
TAMPA—In three months, we’ll find out just how much sway Roger Goodell holds over the men who pay his prodigious wage.

The NFL commissioner is the driving force behind New York’s bid to land the 2014 Super Bowl, an effort that just gained additional momentum when Arizona dropped out of consideration. That leaves Tampa Bay and South Florida as the only two rivals when owners vote in late May at the league’s spring meetings in Dallas.

Goodell coyly suggests he will remain neutral on the sidelines before the next available Super Bowl site is awarded, but he has already made his preference for a New York Super Bowl public with remarks made at his annual news conference earlier this month.

Don’t believe the spin coming out of Arizona that the Glendale bid was withdrawn primarily due to economic concerns. If that’s true, why are Arizona officials already on record as saying the region will pursue the 2015 game?

Glendale dropped out because Arizona officials are now convinced the New York bid is signed, sealed and delivered for 2014, leaving two warm-weather alternatives out in the cold.

But a lot can happen before that vote occurs and the more owners examine the New York bid, the more they may come to realize it should be rejected, even as a one-time reward to the area for building a new open-air stadium in the Meadowlands of East Rutherford, N.J.

It’s a dumb idea because of logistics, but most of all, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to play the NFL’s showcase game in weather conditions that are likely to help shape the game’s outcome while leaving fans of the two participating teams shivering and miserable.

The typical New York weather in early February is lousy—and no spin by Goodell or Big Apple politicians will change the likelihood of cold temperatures and brisk winds in East Rutherford. The old Giants Stadium was known to be a wind tunnel that turned even the best quarterbacks cautious in late-season games.

What happened to the concept of a neutral field on Super Bowl Sunday?

If the new stadium had a dome, we wouldn’t be having this argument, but the idea of placing a Super Bowl in an open-air facility in the northeast shouldn’t appeal to many owners beyond New England’s Bob Kraft and Philadelphia’s Jeff Lurie, who would like to lure future Super Bowls to their own cold-weather stadiums.

Don’t count the Bay area out of this competition just yet. New York might be the front runner for 2014, but Tampa wasn’t expected to land the 2009 game, either.

When those ballroom doors shut and it’s time to vote, NFL owners have been known to call an audible.