Coldest outdoor Super Bowls
Jan. 16, 1972 -- New Orleans: 39
Jan. 12, 1975 -- New Orleans: 46
Jan. 13, 1974 -- Houston: 50
Jan. 20, 1985 -- Palo Alto, Calif.: 53
Jan. 18, 1976 -- Miami: 57
It was lunch time in late January in Manhattan, not generally the prime window to be dining al fresco. But Aissatou Ndao didn't seem to mind the 34-degree temperatures. She sat in a folding chair, smiling, eating her sandwich, a long way from her native Senegal.
Only one thing could make this better: a blizzard.
“Snow. For me that would be a good business day,” she said, sitting adjacent to her kiosk of hats, gloves and scarves on 7th Avenue. “That’s my dream. Their nightmare is my dream.”
They, in this dream sequence, would be the NFL. The league chose to take the Super Bowl, its centerpiece event, out of the protected elements of a domed stadium or the warm breezes of Florida and stick it in the middle of a New York-New Jersey winter.
This is all you need to know about the backdrop of Sunday’s game between Denver and Seattle: It’s the first Super Bowl with an official snow and ice removal team.
“When you think about it, that kind of an honor,” said Tom Canete, owner of Canete Snow Management of New Jersey.
He’s very excited. Two weeks ago, he even did a power point presentation detailing his “Storm Action Plan,” which includes the use of about two dozen “power brooms” as well as up to 500 humans. Canete said the folks at the Snow and Ice Management Association were blown away.
Did you even know there was a Snow and Ice Management Association? Yeah. Neither did I.
“I asked the SIMA CEO,” said spokesperson Sheri Singer. “There are no members in Atlanta.”
Now it makes perfect sense why Atlanta can’t get another Super Bowl. We may have the occasional ice storm but we lack the connections in the snow and ice management industry. Politics. Can we get Cobb County to hold a secret meeting or something.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is rolling the dice. Technically, NFL owners vote on Super Bowl sites but this wouldn’t be happening if Goodell didn’t want it to. It’s about ego. It’s about money. The league rewards cities with new stadiums and $1.6 billion MetLife Stadium, home to the Giants and Jets, sits just across the Hudson in East Rutherford, N.J.
The NFL’s intended ego rush: Put the grandest event on the biggest of stages. It can only generate more revenue and further the quest of global domination.
If this works and by late Sunday, people aren’t confusing the swamps of Jersey with Denali, Goodell will radiate. Or he could fall face first in a snowdrift — and that would be funny.
Goodell has fallen back on an expected sound bite: That football was meant to be played in the elements. He’s right. Who doesn’t love watching athletes slide around in rain and mud, ice and snow?
The only problem is this isn’t just a football game. If the Super Bowl was like any game in September or December, the NFL wouldn’t have put the last three in domed stadiums. Also eight of the last 14. And 16 overall. If the NFL was so intent on football being played in the elements, the commissioner wouldn’t be sitting so close to a thermostat so often.
This is dumb. Super dumb.
You think it’s bad when people have to make contingency plans for an outdoor wedding? How about a football game with over 80,000 in attendance and an estimated world wide television audience of a billion? How about all of the events during the week that spin off the game and the transportation system to get to those events and the millions that go into just the pregame and halftime entertainment?
(This is the last Super Bowl where Janet Jackson would want to have a wardrobe malfunction.)
A storm last Tuesday dropped 14 inches of snow in the area. It wasn’t an aberration. Even the Farmer’s Almanac recently projected that the “first 10 days of February in the Northeast region of the US could be quite volatile and especially turbulent.”
Volatile and turbulent. Now there’s a party.
The NFL has contingency plans to change the time of the game, the day of the game and everything except the venue of the game. (Goodell would lose his deposit on the room and decorations.)
Never before have so many people been so obsessed daily about the weather forecast. It’s as if everybody is tracking a meteor that’s falling to earth.
The latest Sunday forecast calls for temperatures of 24 to 38 degrees with a 10 percent chance of precipitation and a waxing crescent moon. A consensus of dart throwers expect a mixture of rain and snow Saturday and Sunday.
Players are understandably cool with all this. They’re players. They’re in the Super Bowl.
“I still treat this game like Pop Warner,” said Seattle safety Earl Thomas. “Little kids love to play in the mud and the snow. That’s just how I am. I don’t care.”
The last year I covered a Super Bowl with snow on the ground was 1992 in Minneapolis (Washington vs. Buffalo). The game was held in the Metrodome.
For those who’ve never been to Minneapolis, several buildings downtown are connected by overhead tubes for people to walk through. Nobody ever went outside. It was like living in a Habitrail. But the game was protected.
Not the case this week. In the famous 1967 “Ice Bowl” in Green Bay between the Packers and Dallas, a marching band had to cancel its performance because horn players kept having their lips stick to the mouthpieces. Ray Nitschke got frostbite on his toes.
Here’s what people forget about that year. After winning the “NFL championship” — today’s equivalent of the NFC title — the Packers played Oakland in the Super Bowl. In Miami. They went from minus-15 degrees (minus-48 with the windchill) to a cozy 68.
There was no reason for contingency plans.
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