Hey, who wants to hear more analysts complaining about the Super Bowl being held in New Jersey on Sunday? ESPN's Mike Ditka, who played in frigid Chicago for six seasons and coached there for 11 more, thinks the idea is "stupid", as he told the Detroit Free Press.
“The weather’s going to be a problem,” Ditka told the Free Press. “They made a big mistake. The game shouldn’t be there. I mean, it’s stupid.”
Ditka's logic is based in the fact that playing in the Super Bowl is a "privilege" for the players, and that they can't show their talents in the elements.
While I understand that line of thinking, let's not pretend like every other Super Bowl has been held on a gorgeous 65 degree evening. The last three Super Bowls have been held indoors, completely removing the elements from the equation. Unless you hold every game in a dome, Florida, or California, the weather is going to be an issue – and even when the game is in a dome, there can still be logistical nightmares outside of the stadium if awful weather arrives.
But hey, that seems to be the way the NFL is going. The next three Super Bowl locations all fall into one of those criteria, and two of the next three finalists for 2018 do as well. The cold weather Super Bowl isn't the new norm, it's an anomaly – why not celebrate that fact instead of bemoaning it?
Besides, if the game this year was being held inside the University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona, then nobody would be able to complain about the cold, and what would the networks do without that?
