The big chill

Future Super Bowls won't all be as nice as this one

By John Donovan, CNNSI.com

SAN DIEGO -- It's hard, really hard, for anyone sitting in the warmth of the late January sun in San Diego to think of the Super Bowl anywhere else. Miami, maybe. Sure, New Orleans every once in a while.

But Detroit? Washington D.C.?

Brrrrrrrrrr.

Super Bowls and warm-weather cities have been partners from the start. In 37 years of Super Bowls, counting this year's, the Super Bowl has been held in exactly two traditionally cold-weather cities: Minneapolis in 1992, and on the outskirts of Detroit (Pontiac, Mich.) in 1982.

Sunday, Jan. 26, 2003 -- Game day "You don't go with Bermuda shorts and you don't go looking for mai tais." -- Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, on readying for a northern Super Bowl 0-4 -- Tampa Bay's record against the Raiders (both L.A. and Oakland) in California. The largest fireworks show in San Diego history exploded over the bay Saturday night, the capper to a bang-up week of hype and fun for Super Bowl XXXVII. On Sunday, thousands will flock into the Mission Valley area to Qualcomm Stadium to try to squeeze into the aging place -- probably the last Super Bowl to be held there ever. Temperatures for the game (it kicks off at 3:25 p.m. PST) are expected to reach into the 70s. Tickets for the game, with a face value of $400 and $500, are extremely tough to come by. It all sets up as one of the more promising Super Bowls in a while, the first ever matching the league's best offense vs. its best defense. It all comes down to this: Bucs' defense or Raiders' offense?

It has been a great fit, these balmy climes and the NFL's showcase. Fans traveling to see their teams play get a mid-winter break. Players and coaches don't have to worry about frozen fields or inclement weather. And the thousands and thousands of others who tromp into Super Bowl cities get a much easier go of it.

It's not tough to figure out why these Super Bowls are simply better. At 6 p.m. Saturday in San Diego, it was 69 degrees and clear. At that same hour in Detroit, it was cloudy with a wind-chill factor of 16. By kickoff Sunday in San Diego, it's supposed to be in the '70s.

You do the math.

As nice as an arrangement as it's been, though, as much good as Super Bowls in the sun have been for the league, the partnership between the NFL and several of its steady warm-weather beaus is about to end. It's not difficult to figure that one out, either.

"We are considering, as everyone knows, Super Bowls in northern cities, particularly New York and the nation's capital. And obviously the weather this week is going to suggest that my timing in putting that in front of the membership may not have been exquisite," NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said Friday. "But the point is that there are more and more cities seeking Super Bowls with outstanding facilities.

"The competition for Super Bowls," he added, "is fiercer than it's ever been."

New state-of-the-art stadiums have been built in NFL cities the past several years, and the league aims to pay back as many of those cities as it can. Not every NFL city is large enough, has ample hotel space or has a playing field that can handle a late-January, early February Super Bowl.

But those that fit the criteria -- Detroit, for example, with domed Ford Field -- get rewarded for their spending on stadiums by getting a game that has huge economic impact for the area. FDor instance, one estimate says $396 million flowed into New Orleans for last year's Super Bowl.

Detroit is scheduled to get the Super Bowl in 2006, after Houston ('04) and Jacksonville, Fla. ('05). Then the league probably will move back to Miami for the '07 game, according to the Miami Herald.

• King: Bucs' defense rests its case • Banks: Bucs' Johnson validated • Banks: No. 1 D the difference • Donovan: Raiders too slow • Donovan: Controversy burns Raiders • Statitudes: Havenots can have faith • Statitudes: By The Numbers • Mandel: Broadcast took its time • George: Super Bowl ads fun again

"Coming off the next three Super Bowl cities," the NFL's vice president of special events, Jim Steeg, told the paper, "we need to go to an experienced, warm-weather site."

The fight for the Super Bowl only figures to heat up, especially for cities that have fallen out of favor with the league. San Diego, for instance, though it is widely hailed for its fine weather, abundance of hotel rooms and great amenities for visitors, is on the outs with the league because of 36-year-old Qualcomm Stadium, which the NFL says is inadequate.

In fact, Tagliabue said Friday he did not envision another Super Bowl in San Diego anytime in the near future, certainly not until the city gets a new stadium. San Diego also hosted the game in 1998 and '88.

Tagliabue's remark, at the height of Super Bowl week, enraged many San Diegans.

"I take it as a threat and I'm extremely insulted," San Diego councilwoman Donna Frye told The San Diego Union-Tribune. "This city has rolled out the red carpet, people's lives have been disrupted, and this is the thanks they give us -- to insult us and threaten us."

Whatever happens with San Diego, it's clear that the glory days of a sultry Super Bowl site practically every year are done.

Bundle up. There's a storm coming in.