E-Mail
Print
NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says New Orleans was a "terrific" Super Bowl host and that the Superdome power outage that delayed the game for 34 minutes will have no effect on the city's future bids to host the league's championship.
Goodell says, "The most important thing is to make sure people understand it was a fantastic week," and that it "will be remembered as one of the great Super Bowl weeks."
New Orleans has now hosted 10 Super Bowls. Officials have said they will bid to host an 11th in 2018 to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the city's founding.
Goodell says the outage is not of great concern going forward because it is "fixable," and the league will look forward to evaluating New Orleans' next Super Bowl bid.
The Superdome had a backup power system that was about to be used during the NFL championship's electrical outage but it wasn't needed because power started coming back at that time, Goodell said.
The NFL has contingency plans for game interruptions, regardless of the cause.
The 34-minute Super Bowl delay occurred when a piece of monitoring equipment sensed an abnormality in the electrical load feeding the dome, officials have said. But the game wasn't in danger of being postponed because of the backup system.
"That was not a consideration last night," NFL vice president of business operations Eric Grubman said at a news conference Monday. "That is not what was at play."
Goodell was sitting with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie during the game. The Meadowlands will host next year's Super Bowl.
"We already had the conversation," Goodell said about avoiding a repeat of the blackout. "This is clearly something that can be fixed, and it's clearly something that we can prepare for. And we will."
Grubman said Goodell has the "sole authority" to enforce any contingency plans, and was in perfect position to do so Sunday night.
"He was there and he had the full reports," Grubman said. "We were quickly able to determine we did not have a situation that would cause a permanent interruption in the game. There were no safety issues, we had multiple equipment and sources of power."
And if they didn't?
While declining to be specific, Grubman said the league has "backup plans" for continuing the game. Those plans all focus on playing the full 60 minutes, regardless of whether it is the same day or on another day.
So it's unlikely that the Ravens, ahead 28-6 at the time of the partial blackout, would have simply been declared the winners and awarded the Lombardi Trophy. In the end, Baltimore still won, beating San Francisco 34-31. The momentum shifted tremendously after the lights went back on, however, with the 49ers rallying to make it 31-29 at one point in the fourth quarter.