Though the annual league meetings in Orlando won’t entail a vote on the location of Super Bowl XLVIII, the question of whether Jets owner Woody Johnson’s recent assault on the league office will derail New York’s quest for a Super Bowl looms over the event that opened Sunday night.
Gary Myers of the New York Daily News looks at the potential impact of Johnson’s challenge to the secret coin flip that gave the Giants the first regular-season game at the shared stadium. And Myers estimates that the total impact of getting -- or losing -- the game could be $1 billion, based on the infusion to the economy resulting from the hosting of the game and the enhanced ability to nail down a naming-rights arrangement that could be worth $25 million per year over 20 years.
But we simply can’t imagine the NFL allowing the decision as to the location of any Super Bowl to be influenced by a desire to settle scores as to irrelevant, and frankly petty, disagreements. It’s widely believed that a New York Super Bowl is coming -- and the fact that Johnson said something that ticked off Roger Goodell simply shouldn’t change that.
If it does, then maybe Johnson was right all along.