There’s going to be an outdoor Super Bowl in the north in January?
No, February. The football season expands to fill all space left to it. If the NFL gets its way and adds several games, the Super Bowl will soon be a lead-in to the Masters.
Won’t it be cold?
Of course it will be cold. The ground in New Jersey in February is so hard you can barely bury a union boss. It might get so cold the linemen’s syringes will crack.
What happens if it snows?
The field will get white. There will be snowballs. It’ll be pretty, as long as the cameras can still pick up the field. Snow games are memorable: the Ice Bowl, the Tuck Rule game, the guy on the little Patriots snow plow.
Won’t the fans be inconvenienced?
Fans? At a Super Bowl? Fuggedaboudit. Super Bowls are attended by advertisers, corporate partners, and the membership committees of country clubs ranked in Golf Digest’s Top 100. Most of them will be safely ensconced in heated luxury suites, rapping their Patek Phillippes against the glass to salute good plays.
Who decides where the Super Bowl will be?
Direct descendants of the Nine Good Men who ruled Siena in the thirteenth century gather to spin a large wooden wheel, on which the legend Ovunque, Ma Jacksonville (“Anywhere But Jacksonville”) has been inscribed.
Whose Super Bowl is it, New York or New Jersey?
Two teams will host this game, the New York Giants and New York Jets. Both play in New Jersey. There is an NFL team that plays in New York State, but it’s the Buffalo Bills, and they have been barred by constitutional amendment from having anything to do with further Super Bowls. They know what they did.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York has unofficially changed the name of Forty-Eighth Street to Super Bowl XLVIII Way, in honor of the 2014 game that will be played across the river. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey replied that he doesn’t have to rename anything because the game will actually be played in his state. Governor Christie is certain the event will be a great boon to New Jersey’s finances, which are dire enough that the Joyce Kilmer Rest Stop on the Jersey Turnpike has had to lay off hundreds of trees. New Jersey does stand to benefit from the increased taxes paid by limo drivers who’ll be bringing game attendees to their hotels in Manhattan.
Hasn’t the NFL tried this cold-weather thing before?
The Super Bowl has been held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in Detroit and Pontiac, Michigan. All were played in enclosed stadiums. The two coldest game-time temperatures for outdoor Super Bowls both came in New Orleans, at Tulane Stadium: 39 degrees in 1972 and 46 degrees in 1975. Since the games were in New Orleans, no one in the crowd felt a thing.
Will the corporate clients really come to a winter site?
To New York? Home of Tiffany, Bendel, Bergdorf, Barneys, Cartier, Bloomie’s, and Saks? Yes, they will come. Besides, surely some of them haven’t seen “Wicked” yet.
Is an outdoor game in February fair to a warm-weather team?
Ah, a football question at last.
One way to play football is with a speedy precision scheme based on hot reads and exquisitely timed passes. Another is to beat the crap out of the other guy. It’s football, bunky, not tennis. If your quarterback can’t throw the ball through a little wind, if you’re kept from doing what you do best by a little weather, you’ll just have to watch someone else hold up the trophy, and Bobby Layne and Johnny Unitas will finally stop spinning in their graves. If your game plan only works under perfect conditions, maybe you shouldn’t be the champions after all.
If the Jets and Giants meet in the Super Bowl in the Meadowlands, who will be the host team?
Spike Lee and Wu-Tang Clan. King Kong will perform the coin toss, Robert De Niro will sing at halftime, and Twyla Tharp and Joe Piscopo will fight a cage match for the soul of Frank Sinatra.
The game is four years away. The tailgating in the parking lot begins on Tuesday.
