In preparing our special edition on Super Bowl XLV, I spent many months talking to those preparing for the big game in Arlington last February. I heard repeatedly that they were preparing for the “worst-case scenario” in terms of weather.
Silly me, I assumed that meant, you know, the absolutely worst possible weather that might strike North Texas. Because, as you know, that’s essentially what we got leading up to the game. But now we know that when the NFL says “worst-case scenario,” it means “the worst thing that’s still fairly likely to happen.”
All the snow and ice we were blessed with just in time to welcome the Steelers and Packers to town has the NFL’s man in charge of planning its special events rethinking that definition:
“When you plan a contingency, you plan for the most likely worst-case scenario, not any kind of cataclysmic event that might really stop everything,” Frank Supovitz, the NFL’s senior vice president of events, told Daniel Kaplan of Sports Business Journal. “Now, we have to go a little bit further than just what you expect.”
So here we have confirmation, that the next time Jerry and the Boys decide to push for a bid to host the championship game, it’s the freakish precipitation they saw during their last visit that the NFL owners are going to keep at the forefront of their minds.
North Texas would like to join the regular rotation of places to host the game multiple times – along with Miami, Tampa, New Orleans, and Arizona – but is the league ever going to want to risk such bad weather again? Â Doesn’t seem likely.
