Superdome officials say they’ve been inundated with requests from people who would love to get together with fellow saints fans and watch the Super Bowl on the big screens at the Saints’ home stadium. But the NFL won’t allow it.
“Yeah, we’ve had a lot of calls, and certainly wish we could show it, but there is a long standing NFL policy that you cannot show the game to a mass audience, so we’re just not able to do it. Sorry, wish we could,” Superdome spokesman Bill Curl told Fox 8 in New Orleans.
Similar requests have come up in the past, including when the Saints played the NFC Championship Game in Chicago in 2006. The league, however, stands in the way of that type of public broadcast of the game.
The reason? TV ratings, which are based on people who watch the game at home. The league doesn’t want tens of thousands of people to watch in a stadium, because those tens of thousands wouldn’t be counted toward the official TV audience that the networks use to sell commercial time to advertisers.