In the run-up to the vote giving the 2014 Super Bowl to the Meadowlands, there was a lot of concern from the media about how the NFL could possibly send them to somewhere cold to watch a football game in February.
We figured that the crying would wind down for a few years and then kick back up a little closer to the actual game. Thanks to the storm that's been hammering Dallas and a good chunk of the rest of the country over the last few days, we've been forced blessed to have it back on the radar screen earlier than expected.
Reporters from several different outlets are crying in the hotel rooms that someone else is paying for because it has been slightly harder to get platitudes from football players this year than it might have been if the game was being held in San Diego. Les Carpenter, who apparently covers the corporate junket beat for Yahoo!, is apoplectic because the sleet and snow is going to mean that no one can play golf this week. Judging from the Twitter feeds of the writers gathered for the game, you'd think that Dallas, not Cairo, was the most dangerous city on the planet right now.
We'd say there was a bright side to all the complaining because it would make it a lot less likely that there will be any whining left to do by the time 2014 rolls around. Judging from the thinness of the skins out there, though, things aren't going to work out that way.
Hey, we're all entitled to losing perspective now and then so let's not hate on the poor media too much. Let's not let them get away with the nonsense either. We're still four days away from the game (which is being played in a dome, for heaven's sakes), which means that there's little reason to believe that the weather is going to actually impact the event. Unless your job involves treating Ben Roethlisberger's hiatus from alleged sexual assaults like he has beaten cancer, you don't really care much about what it's been like on Monday or Tuesday.
But what about the people trying to get to the game? Aren't they getting the royal screwjob because of what the weather has done to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport? Sure, but they'd be almost as screwed no matter where the game was this week. The extent of the bad weather means that airports in Dallas, Chicago and across the Northeast have run into problems. That spreads across the whole country awfully quickly and it means that getting to anywhere would be a pain in the neck right now.
The plight of any regular ticket holder doesn't really bother anyone complaining about the game anyway. Whether the complainer is a member of the media or some corporate flunky, they only care that an annual week of sunny weather hasn't been given to them this year. You missed out, which is too bad, but the Super Bowl was a football game before it was a media circus and a festival of capitalism. For one year, it's okay that it has been relegated to being that again.
Sports
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City and is a contributor to FanHouse.com and ProFootballTalk.com in addition to his duties for NBCNewYork.com. You can follow him on Twitter.
