400 Ticketholders Left Seat-Less at the Super Bowl
Clad in Cheeseheads and Steel Curtain t-shirts, the football faithful flocked to Arlington, Texas this past Sunday for the forty-fifth annual competition between the two top teams in the NFL. Despite many nearly being unable to attend due to snowstorms across the nation cancelling 300 flights into Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, many airlines gave priority to those travelling to the Super Bowl. Tickets with face values of $800 were being resold by scalpers at triple that value initially and rising to $4,000 for non-premium seats shortly before game time. Some even paid $200 just to watch the game on the jumbo screen outside of the stadium in the cold. Despite an estimated $170 million being generated just by the sale of all seats and luxury suites, somehow 1,250 seats were never set up, leaving 850 people in alternate seats and 400 without any seats at all.
A combination of factors led to the ticketholders being denied seating. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pushed for temporary seats to be installed in the stadium to push the capacity of the stadium to 105,000 to surpass the previous record attendance at a Super Bowl of 103,985 for the 1980 Super Bowl at the Rose Bowl (the final count was just short at 103,219). The effort to install these chairs was hamstrung by the inclement weather, which rolled in last Tuesday, and delayed the installation of the chairs. The installation of the chairs was completed mere hours before the Big Dance, which was too late to allow their inspection by the fire marshal, so the chairs were deemed unsafe.
As spectators entered the stadium that day, those unlucky enough to have tickets in the incomplete sections were held to the side while the administration decided what to do with them. Two-thirds of those people were lucky enough to have alternate seats for them. One-third of those people were initially forced to wait for two hours in a gated holding area, where many chanted, “Jerry sucks!” or “NFL sucks!” Eventually, they were given a choice of standing on a platform in a corner of the stadium or watching the game on monitors at a field-level club behind the Steelers’ bench. Neither option was very desirable, according to comments from these ticketholders.
The unlucky 400 people were given free food, drinks, memorabilia, triple the amount of the face value of their tickets, and tickets to next year’s Super Bowl. For those who lived locally and did not purchase their tickets from a scalper, this was probably a decent offer, if somewhat disappointing. For many others who lived out of town and spent several thousand to travel by plane and stay at a hotel, only seeing the game live would suffice. Each Super Bowl is a unique event, and fans pay a premium price to see their favorite team play there. There is no guarantee of their team returning to the Super Bowl the next year, so it is impossible to compensate many fans for missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime event. Fortunately for both teams’ fans, their teams have made many appearances in the Super Bowl, so there is a decent chance for seeing them in next year’s Super Bowl. That is assuming, of course, that there is an NFL season next year.
