The owner of the company hired to install temporary seats at Cowboys Stadium for the Super Bowl says he’s being wrongly blamed for the failure to get everyone who bought a ticket into a seat.
“I think it’s an effort to hang somebody with the blame, clear the Cowboys, clear the NFL , to let their fans have someone to be angry at,” Scott Suprina, owner of Seating Solutions, told Newsday.
According to Suprina, the issue isn’t that his company didn’t work fast enough. It’s that the NFL didn’t give his workers the access to the stadium they were promised.
Suprina does accept some of the blame, however, and the excellent reporting from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on the matter seems to suggest that Seating Solutions didn’t react quickly enough when the local authorities raised concerns about the temporary seats.
“Please note that we are continuing to interact with Seating Solutions and they are continuing to express that these inspection items will be corrected and are always expressing cooperation,” Arlington building official Ed Dryden wrote more than two weeks before Super Bowl Sunday. “However, the day of the event is 16 days away and some of these issues are significant and from our perspective there’s not a great deal of progress that we can see.”
For his part, Suprina says fire officials in Arlington were “overzealous” in questioning the integrity of the temporary seating structures. It’s hard to find fault with the local authorities there, however. Ensuring the safety of the people in the stadium is, after all, the job of the local inspectors. Getting the seats built in a way that satisfies the local inspectors is the job of the contractor.
And ensuring before they sold tickets that there would be seats for the ticket holders was the job of the NFL.