On Wednesday, I fueled up the ’68 VW bus and drove to Berea, Ohio for a meeting with Browns coach Eric Mangini. An interview will appear in the upcoming PFT season preview magazine. (We’ll soon be putting up a link for “pre-orders,” a fascinating concept whereby we get your money without having to actually send anything out for weeks.)
Apart from a bunch of questions regarding his coaching philosophies, his history with the Patriots and the Jets, and his future with the Browns, I asked Mangini about the hottest topic of the day -- the playing of a Super Bowl in a cold-weather site.
“I think it’s great,” Mangini said. “I think it’s going to change dramatically the whole process. You can’t count on a perfectly controlled environment to play the game. You could be playing in a foot of snow, playing with ridiculous winds, playing with icy rains, the cold. It’s great.”
So what about eventually a cold-weather Super Bowl in the city situated on Lake Erie?
“That would be pretty cool,” Mangini said. “Not only with the elements but with the history of the franchise, it would be pretty amazing.”
And so the unofficial list of teams in cold-weather cities with open-air stadiums that would welcome a Super Bowl is now up to four: Washington, Baltimore, Green Bay, and Cleveland.