FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The Giants owners are pushing hard to bring the 2014 Super Bowl to the Northeast, seeking to play the game at the Meadowlands in the new $1.6 billion stadium — the one without the retractable roof — they’ll share with the Jets.
One of the Giants own players, though, at first didn’t think it’s such a good idea.
“I don’t even want to talk about it,” running back Brandon Jacobs said yesterday. “That’s never gonna happen. It’s too cold. It might be snowing.”
Perhaps if Jacobs were savvier in these matters he would have suggested fans attending an open-air Super Bowl at the Meadowlands wear some of the Under Armour products — including underwear — he was pitching along Radio Row.
Unaware that the owners of the team he plays for are working to make a New York Super Bowl a reality, Jacobs amended his thoughts.
“Obviously it would be a hurdle, but it’s something that could be done,” Jacobs said. “From the history of the NFL, the Super Bowl has always been in a warm place. Whether or not guys would want to play in it or not, we play in it all the time. It doesn’t bother us at all. I hope we’re the team playing in it.”
Giants co-owners Jonathan and Steve Tisch yesterday attended NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s press conference along with Jets owner Woody Johnson and afterward expressed their hope that they can bring the Super Bowl home.
No cold-weather city with an outdoor stadium has ever hosted the Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl Advisory Committee made an exception to its “50-degree rule” before considering New York as an option. Miami, Tampa and Glendale, Ariz., are the other contenders.
Goodell sounded intrigued by a cold-weather game.
“There are real benefits to the league considering this,” he said. “I think the idea of playing in the elements is central to the way the game of football is played.”
That’s the way the game was played during Tiki Barber’s 10-year career with the Giants and the native Virginian wants to see a Super Bowl in his adopted New York-area home.
“I think it would be cool,” Barber said yesterday prior to interviewing Snoop Dogg for Yahoo! Sports.com. “If there’s a cold-weather city that could handle an outside game, it would be New York. The city I think would embrace it. The only thing that would be an issue if we get a weekend like we’re about to get here and we get dumped with 12 inches of snow. But I think there’s something in that. So many great games you remember [were played in bad weather], even in recent history the Patriots snow game against the Oakland Raiders. You remember it for the game and the tuck rule, but the snow and the conditions were just as much of a character in the story as the game was.
“I think it would be a big deal in a big city. It would add to the mystique and the lore of the game. You do go to some of these cities and you go, ‘Why are we here for a week, there’s nothing to do?’ I think in New York the only danger would be the trouble guys could potentially get into. But for the fans and the media and everybody that comes from all over the place, it would be a blast.”