Ross has poured out money, made modern renovations, will build a roof for the weenies, put the team in undesirable situations, and turns out all he really had to do was wait out the mess displayed by other cities unfit to host the Super Bowl as Miami is naturally a great city to do so.
By Will Leitch
Two years ago, the Super Bowl host city rejected the Super Bowl. The NFL, when it hosted Super Bowl XLVIII in East Rutherford, N.J., took a risk of blizzard, oppressive cold, or massive traffic nightmares. The one thing it didn't account for was New York City giving the game a Bronx cheer.
When the Super Bowl comes to your town, as a rule, you are supposed to bow. The NFL likes to take over during Super Bowl week. When the game was in Indianapolis -- an underrated host city that I bet gets another Super Bowl within the next decade -- the historic American city essentially turned into an NFL Town for a fortnight. If you were a resident of Indianapolis, didn't care about football one way or the other and wanted your life to be about its usual business, you were out of luck: You lived in Goodell Village, whether you liked it or not.
Downtown Indianapolis had a zipline running through it, for Pete's sake. And for certain cities, this works. New Orleans is ideal; an argument could be made that the Super Bowl should be there every year. Any Florida city is happy to be NFL Town for a week or so. Even Detroit eagerly opened its arms to the game a decade ago. But New York, they weren't having it.
Here's a section from my column on the scene at the time:
- Here in New York, the Super Bowl is... just another thing going on. The NFL, as it usually does for its Super Bowls, has turned a large section of downtown (in this case Times Square) into a NFL-branded monstrous mini-playland, with a massive slide and every square inch of space branded with beer logos. In most cities, this becomes the centerpiece of all local activity. Here? It's just another reason to stay the hell out of Times Square, Everywhere you look here, a New Yorker is ignoring the Super Bowl. Downtown, among the folks who get nosebleeds every time they venture above 14th Street, you would have no idea a Super Bowl is happening at all. The Super Bowl is taking place in two places: In the Sheraton Times Square hotel and surrounding Times Square area, and East Rutherford, N.J., at MetLife Stadium. Everywhere else here, life is just going on.
As I documented in that piece, this drove the NFL crazy; the league has grown to such mammoth proportions that anything less than total capitulation from a city when it storms its shores is unacceptable. Everything that could have gone wrong with that Super Bowl didn't, and yet the NFL will never, ever come back to NYC for its Super Bowl.
Also, the whole "Take a Train Back From the Super Bowl" ended up with this:
Well, the hordes are about to land on the San Francisco Bay Area for Super Bowl 50, and it's becoming increasingly clear: The NFL is facing a similar issue. Next week's Super Bowl is in Santa Clara, which is roughly 45 miles from San Francisco. (That's about 35 miles farther away than Times Square was from MetLife Stadium.) "Super Bowl City," which is the thing with the ziplines and all the craziness, is right there on the Embarcadero. And San Francisans are furious about it.
Let's flip through the list of complaints locals have about the Super Bowl, helpfully compiled and chronicled by an excellent site, SFist:
• There's a massive advertisement for Verizon wrapping around Four Embarcadero Center -- common at the Super Bowl, but particularly hideous in San Francisco -- that it turns out might be illegal.
•Santa Clara is getting all the tax breaks, but San Francisco has to foot the bill for all the people who will actually be visiting (as can be attested by the fact that all media and league executives were assigned to hotels in San Francisco, not Santa Clara or San Jose).
• The FBI is worried about terrorist activity in the city during Super Bowl Week.
• Getting into Super Bowl City -- if you are foolish enough to want to do so -- is going to be roughly as difficult as getting on an airplane.
• Major San Francisco construction projects are being shut down to accommodate the Super Bowl.
• People who live downtown aren't going to be able to get their mail delivered
• It's probably going to rain. Oh, and the traffic is already a problem, and we're still 10 days away from the game.
Remember, the NFL demands that cities fall all over themselves when the Super Bowl comes to town. (It actually demands those cities pay for new stadiums so they can host them.) San Franciscans are rejecting the Super Bowl a week and a half before it even shows up. I won't arrive there myself until Tuesday, and I'm already nervous that the city is going to be on fire by the time I show up. They'll never have it in San Francisco/Santa Clara again either. I wonder if they're already regretting it.
There might just be certain cities that are equipped to host the Super Bowl. The next two are in Houston (2017, hosting for the first time since 2004) and Minnesota (2018), with Miami, Tampa, New Orleans and Atlanta currently bidding for 2019. Those cities are still on the list, along with Arlington (the 2011 host), Indianapolis and Inglewood, the new Rams stadium, which is already on the bidding list for 2020 (along with those 2019 cities). Roger Goodell has also mentioned the idea of having the game in London some year, which sounds fun but would also require the game starting around 11:30 p.m. local time. Depending on what happens with the Chargers and/or Raiders and whether or not they're going to strong-arm another city to build them new digs, that could be it, though.
That's probably enough. All of those cities are happy to have the Super Bowl. Arlington, Atlanta (maybe, assuming there's no black ice this time), Glendale, Houston, Indianapolis, Inglewood, maybe London, Miami, New Orleans, Tampa. Those will work. Seattle could work. London can be the final experiment. The NFL has used the Super Bowl as a strongarm tactic to build new stadiums and get more money from the taxpayers. In San Francisco -- a city, remember, that is not actually hosting the game -- it's still getting free cash. And all it's doing is annoying the locals. The Super Bowl hasn't even arrived in the Bay Area yet, and everyone's already desperate for it to leave.
Full article here: Sport On Earth - When the Super Bowl Comes to Town
By Will Leitch
Two years ago, the Super Bowl host city rejected the Super Bowl. The NFL, when it hosted Super Bowl XLVIII in East Rutherford, N.J., took a risk of blizzard, oppressive cold, or massive traffic nightmares. The one thing it didn't account for was New York City giving the game a Bronx cheer.
When the Super Bowl comes to your town, as a rule, you are supposed to bow. The NFL likes to take over during Super Bowl week. When the game was in Indianapolis -- an underrated host city that I bet gets another Super Bowl within the next decade -- the historic American city essentially turned into an NFL Town for a fortnight. If you were a resident of Indianapolis, didn't care about football one way or the other and wanted your life to be about its usual business, you were out of luck: You lived in Goodell Village, whether you liked it or not.
Downtown Indianapolis had a zipline running through it, for Pete's sake. And for certain cities, this works. New Orleans is ideal; an argument could be made that the Super Bowl should be there every year. Any Florida city is happy to be NFL Town for a week or so. Even Detroit eagerly opened its arms to the game a decade ago. But New York, they weren't having it.
Here's a section from my column on the scene at the time:
- Here in New York, the Super Bowl is... just another thing going on. The NFL, as it usually does for its Super Bowls, has turned a large section of downtown (in this case Times Square) into a NFL-branded monstrous mini-playland, with a massive slide and every square inch of space branded with beer logos. In most cities, this becomes the centerpiece of all local activity. Here? It's just another reason to stay the hell out of Times Square, Everywhere you look here, a New Yorker is ignoring the Super Bowl. Downtown, among the folks who get nosebleeds every time they venture above 14th Street, you would have no idea a Super Bowl is happening at all. The Super Bowl is taking place in two places: In the Sheraton Times Square hotel and surrounding Times Square area, and East Rutherford, N.J., at MetLife Stadium. Everywhere else here, life is just going on.
As I documented in that piece, this drove the NFL crazy; the league has grown to such mammoth proportions that anything less than total capitulation from a city when it storms its shores is unacceptable. Everything that could have gone wrong with that Super Bowl didn't, and yet the NFL will never, ever come back to NYC for its Super Bowl.
Also, the whole "Take a Train Back From the Super Bowl" ended up with this:
Well, the hordes are about to land on the San Francisco Bay Area for Super Bowl 50, and it's becoming increasingly clear: The NFL is facing a similar issue. Next week's Super Bowl is in Santa Clara, which is roughly 45 miles from San Francisco. (That's about 35 miles farther away than Times Square was from MetLife Stadium.) "Super Bowl City," which is the thing with the ziplines and all the craziness, is right there on the Embarcadero. And San Francisans are furious about it.
Let's flip through the list of complaints locals have about the Super Bowl, helpfully compiled and chronicled by an excellent site, SFist:
• There's a massive advertisement for Verizon wrapping around Four Embarcadero Center -- common at the Super Bowl, but particularly hideous in San Francisco -- that it turns out might be illegal.
•Santa Clara is getting all the tax breaks, but San Francisco has to foot the bill for all the people who will actually be visiting (as can be attested by the fact that all media and league executives were assigned to hotels in San Francisco, not Santa Clara or San Jose).
• The FBI is worried about terrorist activity in the city during Super Bowl Week.
• Getting into Super Bowl City -- if you are foolish enough to want to do so -- is going to be roughly as difficult as getting on an airplane.
• Major San Francisco construction projects are being shut down to accommodate the Super Bowl.
• People who live downtown aren't going to be able to get their mail delivered
• It's probably going to rain. Oh, and the traffic is already a problem, and we're still 10 days away from the game.
Remember, the NFL demands that cities fall all over themselves when the Super Bowl comes to town. (It actually demands those cities pay for new stadiums so they can host them.) San Franciscans are rejecting the Super Bowl a week and a half before it even shows up. I won't arrive there myself until Tuesday, and I'm already nervous that the city is going to be on fire by the time I show up. They'll never have it in San Francisco/Santa Clara again either. I wonder if they're already regretting it.
There might just be certain cities that are equipped to host the Super Bowl. The next two are in Houston (2017, hosting for the first time since 2004) and Minnesota (2018), with Miami, Tampa, New Orleans and Atlanta currently bidding for 2019. Those cities are still on the list, along with Arlington (the 2011 host), Indianapolis and Inglewood, the new Rams stadium, which is already on the bidding list for 2020 (along with those 2019 cities). Roger Goodell has also mentioned the idea of having the game in London some year, which sounds fun but would also require the game starting around 11:30 p.m. local time. Depending on what happens with the Chargers and/or Raiders and whether or not they're going to strong-arm another city to build them new digs, that could be it, though.
That's probably enough. All of those cities are happy to have the Super Bowl. Arlington, Atlanta (maybe, assuming there's no black ice this time), Glendale, Houston, Indianapolis, Inglewood, maybe London, Miami, New Orleans, Tampa. Those will work. Seattle could work. London can be the final experiment. The NFL has used the Super Bowl as a strongarm tactic to build new stadiums and get more money from the taxpayers. In San Francisco -- a city, remember, that is not actually hosting the game -- it's still getting free cash. And all it's doing is annoying the locals. The Super Bowl hasn't even arrived in the Bay Area yet, and everyone's already desperate for it to leave.
Full article here: Sport On Earth - When the Super Bowl Comes to Town