North Texas Daily

It was the biggest sporting event of the year. Everyone was watching.
And then, someone, somewhere made a stupid mistake and took focus off the game and put it on the stadium. They gave the audience a chance to think about how stupid it was for that city to host a Super Bowl.

What kind of bonehead would pull a stunt like that? At the Super Bowl, of all places? They knew they’d be hosting the event four years in advance, could they not have tested the stadium out?

How could management be so hammer-fisted as to leave 400 people who had paid thousands of dollars just to get to the city out in the cold because nobody thought to call the fire marshal?

I’m speaking, of course, of the fiasco that was Super Bowl XLV, held at Cowboy’s Stadium in Arlington two years ago.

It was a catastrophe six years in the making. In 2005, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones convinced Arlington to use eminent domain, putting hundreds of families out of their homes to build a giant football stadium.

Since he first bought the team, Jones had wanted to host a Super Bowl, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, he decided to build the stadium in the largest city in the U.S. without public transportation.

In 2009, two years before the Super Bowl it was already slated to host, the stadium opened.
Nothing was done to improve the surrounding infrastructure, despite extreme traffic delays and danger to pedestrians who couldn’t fit on the sidewalks.

Congestion from traffic and construction delays before opening damaged the local businesses the stadium promised to help, forcing many to close. Somehow the area that couldn’t handle regular capacity for a few hours was supposed to handle that many tourists for days.

But on the day of the game, the crown jewel of screw-ups hit. In an attempt to set the Super Bowl attendance record, stadium workers installed 15,000 temporary seats before the game.

However, because they apparently didn’t think of this until the last minute, 1,250 of those seats weren’t finished.

Unfortunately, they’d already sold tickets for all those seats. 850 fans were displaced, and 400 were left out in the freak ice storm that covered the city all weekend.

What’s that? The Superdome’s electrical system couldn’t handle Beyonce’s awesome show at this year’s game, and they had to let the lights reboot for half an hour?
New Orleans residents, hold your heads high. There is so much more that could have gone wrong.

Joshua Knopp is a pre-journalism sophomore. He can be reached at hillbutton@gmail.com.