Soldier Field
Well, it's Super Bowl Sunday, so I thought I'd post something football related. The game is being played in Jacksonville, which just blows my mind every time I think about it. How could the NFL award it's biggest game to a city with 15,000 hotel rooms and almost no taxi cabs or public transportation? Well, that's an easy question to answer, you see Jacksonville built a new stadium, and Paul Tagliabue has stated on several occasions that if you build a stadium, the Super Bowl will come. Which brings me to my major beef with Soldier Field. The Bears and the City of Chicago spent hundreds of millions of dollars tearing it down and rebuilding a new facility on the same spot. Unfortunately, due to two major oversites, it can never host a Super Bowl.
The first is capacity. The NFL requires the Super Bowl stadium to hold 70,000 people. New Soldier Field currently has a seating capacity of 66,000. To me, this is totally idiotic. It means that even if the polar ice caps melt, wiping out the East, West and Southern coasts of the United States and making Chicago a tropical paradise, the NFL would still be playing the Super Bowl in Detroit, or even Green Bay.
The second problem is, the stadium wasn't built with a retractable roof. Now if you read this last sentence, and then threw down your Italian beef sandwich and shouted "BLASPHEMY! The Bears play outside in Bear weather!", please e-mail me, and I will gladly forward you a video tape of the Bears/Texans game from December of this year. However, I will admit, I also like the idea of football outside, but that doesn't mean the roof would be a waste. Soldier Field is usually rated as one of the worst natural surfaces in the NFL by the players. This is because Chicago's fall weather usually turns it into a cow pasture by November. It also results in the field having to be re-sodded at least once or twice during the season. But, if the stadium had a roof, you could just close it 6 days a week and open it on Sunday. And you could host a Super Bowl.
And why am I so hung up on the Super Bowl? After all, if the city actually hosted one, it'd be a real pain in the ass for all the natives. Well, part of it is civic pride. I've lived in and around Chicago for 27 of my 29 years, and there's just no way cities like Jacksonville and Detroit should be hosting and not us. Chicago's got the facilities (media day at McCormick Place, giant parties at Navy Pier), excellent restaurants, and a great bar scene. The public transportation system is very good(and they could probably get the NFL to meet the shortfall in their budget) and there are more than enough cabs. And then there's the fact that when the Soldier Field project was rammed through the state legislature, the money to pay for it was to come from "tourism taxes". This meant extra taxes on hotels, cabs and the like. So why wouldn't you design the stadium so that you could host a Super Bowl, and thus guarantee that the stadium would be able to help pay for itself?
It boggles the mind.
The first is capacity. The NFL requires the Super Bowl stadium to hold 70,000 people. New Soldier Field currently has a seating capacity of 66,000. To me, this is totally idiotic. It means that even if the polar ice caps melt, wiping out the East, West and Southern coasts of the United States and making Chicago a tropical paradise, the NFL would still be playing the Super Bowl in Detroit, or even Green Bay.
The second problem is, the stadium wasn't built with a retractable roof. Now if you read this last sentence, and then threw down your Italian beef sandwich and shouted "BLASPHEMY! The Bears play outside in Bear weather!", please e-mail me, and I will gladly forward you a video tape of the Bears/Texans game from December of this year. However, I will admit, I also like the idea of football outside, but that doesn't mean the roof would be a waste. Soldier Field is usually rated as one of the worst natural surfaces in the NFL by the players. This is because Chicago's fall weather usually turns it into a cow pasture by November. It also results in the field having to be re-sodded at least once or twice during the season. But, if the stadium had a roof, you could just close it 6 days a week and open it on Sunday. And you could host a Super Bowl.
And why am I so hung up on the Super Bowl? After all, if the city actually hosted one, it'd be a real pain in the ass for all the natives. Well, part of it is civic pride. I've lived in and around Chicago for 27 of my 29 years, and there's just no way cities like Jacksonville and Detroit should be hosting and not us. Chicago's got the facilities (media day at McCormick Place, giant parties at Navy Pier), excellent restaurants, and a great bar scene. The public transportation system is very good(and they could probably get the NFL to meet the shortfall in their budget) and there are more than enough cabs. And then there's the fact that when the Soldier Field project was rammed through the state legislature, the money to pay for it was to come from "tourism taxes". This meant extra taxes on hotels, cabs and the like. So why wouldn't you design the stadium so that you could host a Super Bowl, and thus guarantee that the stadium would be able to help pay for itself?
It boggles the mind.
posted by CT at 8:53 AM
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