Pro Bowl Changes Affect Super Bowl XLV Planners
Had breakfast this morning with the NFL’s “Super”-Man, Frank Supovitz (pictured). His official title is senior vice president for events, and he’s the man charged with producing the league’s biggest spectacles, including the Super Bowl. He’s in town for a few days with dozens of event planners from the league and its sponsors and partners for what they term “FAM Week.”
That’s short for “FAMiliarization Week.” (Don’t ask why those first three letters are capitalized.) The Super Bowl XLV Host Committee has organized itineraries for these folks to get to know the area, Cowboys Stadium, and a host of other venues available for events in the run-up to the big game in February 2011.
Obviously putting together a Super Bowl is a major challenge. But the NFL’s experiment of changing the timing of the Pro Bowl will throw some additional hurdles into the process. Couple that with North Texas never having hosted before, and Super Bowl XLV will put Supovitz and his staff to an unusual test.
In 2011, the Pro Bowl will be played the week before the Super Bowl (a break from tradition, as it’s usually the week after) in Hawaii. The NFL has to manage the set up and execution of two major events, thousands of miles apart and with a big time zone difference.
The Super Bowl in South Florida next February will give them a bit of a practice run on pulling off the Pro Bowl before the Super Bowl. But it doesn’t seem nearly the challenge of 2011, since that next Pro Bowl will be played in the same stadium as Super Bowl XLIV a week later.
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2 comments
Jason writes that “the NFL’s experiment of changing the timing of the Pro Bowl will throw some additional hurdles into the process.” He cites these additional hurdles: “The NFL has to manage the set up and execution of two major events, thousands of miles apart and with a big time zone difference.”
Those are the same annual hurdles whether the game is a week before or a week after the Super Bowl. Also, it’s hard to see how this “doesn’t seem nearly the challenge of 2011,” when the two games will be in the same stadium. After all, the hurdles of geography and time zone difference won’t exist, so it should be easier.
Jackson: It was Frank Supovitz who cited the Pro Bowl change as a new challenge, not me. I’d guess that having the final preparation for the much bigger, much more important game overlap with pulling off the smaller event makes a big difference. In previous years, with the Pro Bowl largely out of the spotlight because it’s so anticlimactic, I’ll bet they’ve hardly had to think about Hawaii until the Super Bowl is ready to go or even over.
As for your second point, I believe you misunderstood. The two games will be in the same stadium in 2010, but not so when the Super Bowl is in North Texas, in 2011.