Ever since the NFL bucked tradition by choosing New York/New Jersey to host the 2014 Super Bowl, now any old team with an outdated stadium and only one sold-out home game in 2009 is asking if they can have a Super Bowl too.
To wit, the Oakland Raiders insist they be will seeking to host an Oakland Super Bowl themselves once they establish plans for a new stadium, Newsday.com reports.
Since Newsday.com puts this story behind a subscription wall, and since their "preview" of the story is all unintelligible HTML style sheet code, I'll count on ProFootballTalk.com to transcribe the important parts.
"I think Oakland would absolutely be a terrific site for a future Super Bowl," Raiders CEO Amy Trask told Newsday.com, as quoted by ProFootballTalk.com. "And we're working closely with the city and the county and all sorts of exciting ideas with a new Bay Area stadium."
True, the Raiders do not even have any idea where this theoretical "new Bay Area stadium" is going to be. Their current Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum lease runs through 2013, and the 2014 Super Bowl was just awarded to New Jersey.
So only Super Bowls in 2015 and beyond are still up for grabs, and the Raiders can't possible know for sure where they will be playing at that point.
"We like the site of our existing stadium," Ms. Trask told Newsday. "It's on a freeway, and there are two public transport options that drop off right at the stadium. Where other stadiums are trying to figure out how to bring public transportation to their site, the Oakland site has BART, Amtrak, and the Altamont Commuter Express."
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Don't forget the Altamont Commuter Express! No one forgets the Altamont Commuter Express.
But why even bring up these Super Bowl shenanigans if the team doesn't even know what stadium they'll be playing in that year?
Because any positive response from the NFL would set off a chain reaction of self-fulfilling prophesy to get a new Raiders stadium built. If NFL commissioner Roger Goodell even coughed in such a way that sounded favorable to having the Super Bowl in Oakland, then Al Davis would have at least $300 million in loan guarantees the next day.
The NFL has already weighed in favorably on the idea of a Super Bowl in Santa Clara, should the 49ers build their proposed new stadium there.
Joe Kukura is a freelance writer who wonders who would actually use public transportation to get to a Super Bowl considering they already paid $5,000 for a ticket.
