Wednesday, May 26, 2010 :::
Northern New Jersey will host the Super Bowl in 2014, in spite of concerns about "cold weather". Good.Enough with an NFL playoff setup that always ends by giving the advantage to warm-weather teams. And enough with this nonsensical idea that the weather—which affects games all season long—shouldn't have any effect on the blessed sanctity of the championship game.
It's easy to understand why the NFL has, until now, put the Super Bowl in a warm place. The league wanted to make sure people would go. But those days are over. It's time the pampered corners of the country buck up, at least for once, and invest in a parka. Again: just once. Not asking much here. Tampa Bay Buccaneers co-chairman Joel Glazer, who is from snowy Rochester, N.Y., has said he believes the Super Bowl should be played in conditions that don't decide the game's outcome.
The warm-weather backers seem oblivious to their favoritism.Overlooked is the fact that, while this Super Bowl will be played on a cold-weather team's terms, most every other Super Bowl has been held in neutral conditions in a dome, or outside on a grass field in the sort of warm air that only a handful of NFL teams ever get to breathe much beyond October.
The same imbalance exists in college football, where teams in the Midwest and the Plains play the meat of their schedules in the cold, then must play their bowl games against Southern and Western teams in locales like Miami, New Orleans, Glendale, Ariz., and Pasadena, Calif. If team A does better than team B in cold weather, and team B does better than team A in warm weather, it is every bit as much true that warm weather affects the outcome as it is that cold weather affects the outcome. If team A does better than team B in snow, and team B does better than team A in dry conditions, the dry conditions clearly provide team B with an advantage.
Anyway, if you can't figure out why I've labeled this post "race", google "disparate impact".Labels: race
::: posted by dWj at 10:10 AM
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