Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Super Bowl : Reinventing the Wheel

The Cowboys had 110,00 for a game. Had 97.000 for a playoff game. There was a Cowboy's Game and a baseball game. A college football game and a World Series game. The traffic on Collins never turned to gridlock. The NFL is going to come in and reinvent the wheel. The traffic plans the city of Arlington and the Cowboys put together so carefully have been thrown out. So the NFL has created chaos out of order. Yes, a vast majority of the people are coming in from out of town, but a majority of the people who go to a Cowboy game are not from Arlington or particularly familiar with it. The city and the Cowboys just made it that darned easy.The Super Bowl will be fewer cars, fewer people, and fewer variables than the Cowboys and still it will likely be chaos. Why, because the NFL feels it has to reinvent the wheel.

I AM NOT a great Jerry Jones fan. He is the P.T. Barnum of the National Football League. Even if you aren't a fan of Barnum, he did create quite the circus. Jerry has promoted quite the team.  He made sure that from the very start that the Cowboy's Stadium experience was the best in the NFL. The NFL basically forgot all he learned and started over. Hope it goes well.

Here is a comment for Arlington. The TRE could have easily been ramped up for the Superbowl. It would have reduced the foot and car traffic in Arlington. A spur just south of Cowboys Way, would have been reasonable to put in. Absent that, a temporary station on the existent tracks around Cowboys Way at Stadium Drive would have only been two long blocks away. Either way, rail should have been part of this plan.

Security, I agree the site should be secure, shutting down Arlington  for three weeks is just arrogance on the part of the NFL and just gives potential evil doers time to figure the layout and security. It just seems to me that perhaps that the NFL is trying to create havoc just so they can say that it is bigger in every way than a regular season game. While 100,000 people from out of town is different than 100,000 locals,Cowboy fans are not locals to Arlington. It isn't that different. The biggest difference is that there will be more attempted fraud. Except for tickets, the visible things the NFL has done are negligible.