NFL owners on the whole don’t appear eager to return the Super Bowl to New York/New Jersey anytime soon, even with the luck and logistical success of this year’s game.
Fresh off the Seahawks’ 43-8 rout of the Broncos in the first Super Bowl held in an open-air northern city, owners of the Giants and Jets and prominent local politicians are continuing their push for MetLife Stadium to join the league’s unofficial “rotation” and host the Big Game at least once a decade.
They had good reason to crow, considering the area missed the much-feared snowstorm by a day (temperature at kickoff was dry and 49 degrees) and Super Bowl XLVIII ended up being the most-watched TV program in U.S. history.
But while the league was quick to proclaim it a rousing success despite some mass-transit issues in New Jersey before and after the game, the region’s chances of getting another one anytime soon don’t appear to be strong.
The biggest obstacle: competition.
The site of the Super Bowl is decided by a majority vote of the owners, and now that New York has shown an open-air game in a cold climate is possible, bids are now being talked about in Philadelphia, New England, Chicago, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
The next available Super Bowl to be hosted is in 2018 (the game is in Glendale, Ariz., next year, followed by Santa Clara, Calif., in 2016 and Houston in 2017), and the fight will be even more fierce for future games if former warm-weather Super Bowl standbys Miami, San Diego and Los Angeles are able to get new or renovated stadiums.
The owners also are unlikely to come back to New York for quite a while because they like to dangle hosting the Super Bowl as a reward to cities for building new stadiums.
That has caused the small rotation of Miami, New Orleans and Los Angeles that dominated the game’s first four decades (Miami and New Orleans have held the game 10 times each, the most of any city) to fall by the wayside.
It also explains why the game is going to Santa Clara in two years and has a good chance of being played in new publicly funded domes in Minneapolis and Atlanta in the next five years or so.
“We know there’s interest in other communities hosting the Super Bowl,” commissioner Roger Goodell said during his Super Bowl press conference Friday. “We’ll all sit back and review that when we’re done, but we have a very aggressive process in how to select cities.”
Of course, that didn’t keep the Giants, Jets and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer from making it clear to the league’s other owners they don’t think New York should go down as a one-off experiment.
Schumer said Monday he was kicking off his “campaign” to bring the Super Bowl back within the next decade.
“Hosting a Super Bowl in New York is good for the fans, good for the teams, good for the city, and good for the country,” Schumer said in a statement. “Last night’s game, and the week of festivities leading up to it, were truly remarkable. It brought an influx of tourists to New York and put the eyes of the entire world on us.
“It is time for New York to join the list of cities that regularly host the Big Game, and we should not have to wait another 48 years to host it again.”