Monday, February 7, 2011

Not As Super

Imagine paying big bucks to make it to football's high holy day and getting a fumble instead of the game winning touchdown.

As late as last week, the NFL knew there were problems with the installation of temporary Super Bowl seating sections, and could only muster this excuse: "At the end, we just ran out of time". Metaphor to sports aside, how to you select cities years in advance and spend your whole season working up to one game without being able to manage tickets and seating?

At least hour hundred people were forced to give up their seats and watch the game on monitors or use standing-room platforms in corners of Cowboys Stadium. Another 850 fans were moved from their seats in the temporary sections to other seats.

Both NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Super Bowl host / Cowboys owner Jerry Jones acknowledged the seating blunder, and on behalf of the league, Goodell would give tickets for next year's Super Bowl to the 400 fans left without a place to sit. The league already had said it would offer those 400 people refunds of triple the face value of their Steelers-Packers tickets. As for those displaced 850 fan, well, go fuck yourselves, courtesy of the NFL.

A total of about 15,000 temporary seats were added to areas that are usually standing-room only "party pass" areas for Cowboys games, but quite simply, they could not build enough or take into account the number needed - final work on the temporary sections was done Sunday afternoon just prior to the game.

In the coming weeks, the NFL will review what happened to figure out what went wrong, though these no word if they will use the instant reply on their incompetence.

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