There will be a couple familiar Super Bowl sites for 2023 and 2024
The NFL tries to build drama and big headlines out of just about everything, but there’s little suspense anymore with Super Bowl sites.
The NFL will vote to give the 2023 Super Bowl to Arizona and the 2024 Super Bowl to New Orleans, according to Daniel Kaplan of Sports Business Journal. The league will formally vote on it at its meetings this week.
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In previous years the league would have multiple cities bid to host the Super Bowl, but has changed that process in a significant way.
A new way of awarding Super Bowls
The new system does away with multiple cities putting in bids and waiting for word on who will get the Super Bowl, a system the NFL (and, most notably, the Olympics) used for a long time.
Kaplan explained that the NFL now selects a city, negotiates the terms and then the owners vote. There’s a lot less drama that way, and a lot less time wasted by host committees trying to impress the NFL.
The 2023 and 2024 games are the first awarded under the new system.
New Orleans gets back in the rotation
New Orleans is tied for the most Super Bowls hosted (Miami will break that tie with its 11th in 2020), but is has been a while. The last Super Bowl in New Orleans was 2013, and that was the only time it has hosted since 2002.
While that Super Bowl was an exciting game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers, it was also memorable for the power going out, causing a delay. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome is an outlier among Super Bowl stadiums, as one of the more outdated venues the NFL will pick. The NFL’s history is to award Super Bowls to cities with brand new stadiums, especially ones built with public funds. But the draw of having the game in the very popular host city of New Orleans was important for the NFL too.
Arizona will gets its fourth Super Bowl. There was one in Tempe at Sun Devil Stadium, and there have been two at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. The two games in Glendale are among the greatest games in NFL history: The New York Giants’ upset of the undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII and the Patriots’ dramatic win over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX.
When will Las Vegas get a Super Bowl?
The one notable omission from the list of future Super Bowl hosts is Las Vegas. Nevada agreed to give a record $750 million in public money toward the Raiders’ new stadium, and that’s usually the pathway to getting a Super Bowl. The Raiders hope for their new stadium to be ready in 2020.
For what its worth, Kaplan tweeted that he was “sure” Las Vegas would get a Super Bowl and it was only a matter of time. But this week’s news means Las Vegas will wait until at least early 2025 to have the game, and other cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta and Miami have also been repeat hosts and will be in the mix again.
Las Vegas seems like the ultimate Super Bowl destination, but it will be many years before we see Sin City get in on that action.
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Frank Schwab is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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