It looks like the Buffalo Bills could be getting a new stadium- would it let them host a Super Bowl?
The home of the Buffalo Bills for the last 381 games in their franchise’s history, it could soon be coming to an end. Highmark stadium (or whatever you may like to call it) will most likely not be renovated, per a report from 13WHAM’s Mike Catalana. The report goes on to say that the Bills new stadium will still be an open-air stadium.
What is interesting is if Buffalo/Orchard Park could actually host the Super Bowl with a new stadium. Now if everything goes as planned in the article above, it sounds more like a remodel to me than it does a new stadium- but maybe there is a classification that makes it qualify as such.
My point is that if you’ve followed the general trend of once a team builds a new stadium, it usually equals that team/city hosting a Super Bowl. The only true “cold weather” city to have an outdoor Super Bowl was Super Bowl XLVIII, between the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos which was held at MetLife Stadium.
The kickoff temperature was only 49 degrees Fahrenheit, which for anyone raised in the northern half of the country knows that’s a beautiful winter’s night. The coldest Super Bowl was Super Bowl VI when the Dallas Cowboys beat down the Miami Dolphins 24-3 when the temperature was 39 degrees at kickoff.
How exactly do teams get to host the Super Bowl?
This process used to be pretty easy to understand- there would be bidding for the rights to host, and the best bid would win. Now apparently, that doesn’t work anymore. Instead of bidding, each team gets asked if they want to host Football’s biggest game. If the city/team accepts, then the nitty-gritty work starts.
Of course, there are a plethora of rules that a host city has to satisfy to secure it, but why wouldn’t the Buffalo Bills accept the chance to host if asked? Does Buffalo even have enough hotel rooms? The article linked above states that there need to be as many rooms as 35% of the stadium’s capacity that are within an hour’s drive. That means:
0.35 *71,8700=25,155 rooms if I did the math right, rounded up.
It would be a monumental effort to make that happen, and I am not sure how to even find out this number. It would be worth considering if they get the new stadium built and host the second cold weather open-air Super Bowl.