The Eagles have never won a Super Bowl in the traditional way. They’re currently trying to win a Super Bowl in a different way.
By hosting it.
In the aftermath of the bullet-dodging New Jersey Super Bowl, which easily could have created even more of a travel mess than it already did if any of the two winter storms that hit the area since Sunday night had arrived any earlier, Eagles president Don Smolenski continues to push for Philly as a future Super Bowl host.
“I think Philadelphia has so much to offer in and of itself, as a city and as a region, that it would be a great host city,” Smolenski told Derrick Gunn of CSNPhilly.com.
“When the league evaluates Super Bowl bids, they take in so many factors. They take in the city. They take in the stadium, the facilities. They take in the practice facilities and what’s available there. They take in the transportation, ease of getting in and getting out, whether that’s airport or whether that’s train.
“There’s so much that goes into it. They look at that it in its entirety and they don’t just necessarily focus on any one thing. I think that’s true with New York, as you saw it being in multiple locations. They make it work.”
Plenty of cold-weather cities will now be trying to make it work, especially since New York/New Jersey made it work (mostly) on Sunday. But it would be foolish to assume that the league’s very good fortune for the first game that could have been marred by bad weather will mean that the run of luck will continue beyond the first Super Bowl played at the risk of real winter elements.
The NFL doesn’t care about that, because the NFL realizes that the failure of Mother Nature to mar Super Bowl XLVIII will give other cold-weather cities a seat at the table each and every year of the bidding process, putting more pressure on every potential host city to come up with better terms or risk losing out to a town like Philly, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Denver, or New York.