NFL Senior VP/Events Frank Supovitz said that the league is "changing the way it assesses risk in developing contingency plans for future Super Bowls in the wake of the ice and snow that wreaked havoc on the game in North Texas in February," according to Daniel Kaplan of SPORTSBUSINESS JOURNAL. Supovitz said the NFL previously prepared for the "most likely worse-case scenario." In other words, "ice and snow typically melt within hours in North Texas, so the NFL's contingency planning took that trend into account." Supovitz said that the league "did not take into account the possibility of a once-every-40-years storm that left ice and snow on the ground all week." That now "will be changing." Supovitz: "When you plan a contingency, you plan for the most likely worst-case scenario, not any kind of cataclysmic event that might really stop everything. Now, we have to go a little bit further than just what you expect." He "declined to say whether the new criteria would increase the cost of hosting future Super Bowls." Jim Steeg, who ran event planning at the NFL before Supovitz, "voiced skepticism at whether the league really could increase its level of risk planning." Steeg: "In the (1989) Miami Super Bowl, we had the riots break out before the game. How do you prepare, how do you anticipate being three miles away from a town that is burning?" He added that the "most important job of the NFL is to get to know the key decision-makers in each Super Bowl town so they can effect quick change in the event of a crisis" (SPORTSBUSINESS JOURNAL, 4/4 issue).
