Jerry Jones pushed to build Jerry World — AT&T Stadium — to host major sporting events around the world, not just the Dallas Cowboys’ eight or nine home games a year. His building hosted the Super Bowl in 2011, but weather issues in the Metroplex made it an unfortunate experience. Now, the NBA game between the Washington Wizards and the Detroit Pistons has been affected by the region’s weather, which will further make its beautiful facility a less-than-ideal venue for the big game.
The Pistons lost to the Dallas Mavericks 105-111 on Monday and are still stuck in Dallas. The ice storm has forced the cancellation of thousands of flights at Dallas Fort-Worth and Dallas Love airports, and residents are being advised to stay off the roads. Since it is not safe for the Pistons to return home to Detroit, the NBA has announced that their matchup against the Washington Wizards on Wednesday night will will be postponed.
This is not the first time an NBA game has been moved due to weather. A Wizards game was postponed in 2016 due to a winter storm.
Still, as ugly as winter weather can be, it’s not uncommon for the NBA, and even major college basketball, to postpone games due to weather or other water issues. During the legendary Snowmageddon of 2010, which dumped up to three feet of snow on the Washington area, Scottie Reynolds took the subway from the Villanova Hotel to Georgetown’s home arena. In 1994, pyrotechnics caused fire-fighting water cannons to drench the Alamodome. The hall was ready for the match, which ended 50 minutes later.
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Bad weather didn’t delay kickoff the night Aaron Rodgers won his only Super Bowl championship in Arlington, Texas, but it was a miserable week for everyone in town. Ice falling from the roof of the stadium injured construction workers. The weather affected events in the city, as well as shoppers who paid Super Bowl prices to be at the stadium during the game.
Temporary seats were installed to sell more tickets for the game. Due to the icy conditions, the installation of those seats was put behind schedule. The work wasn’t completed until the day of the game, which didn’t give firefighters enough time to inspect them. Those places were deemed unsafe and 1,250 people had to be relocated. According to a statement from the NFL, there were 400 people who could not be re-seated and received refunds at triple face value.
A decade later, another ice storm forces the postponement of an NBA game 1,000 miles away. That delay, of course, pales in comparison to what the people of North and Central Texas are dealing with right now. Hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings are without electricity. This may bring back some bad memories of what happened during the February 2021 power crisis in Texas when millions of people lost power during a severe winter storm.
Politics or climate?
Ask Jones why his building hasn’t won a Super Bowl since 2011, and he’ll blame politics. In January 2022. he said on 105.3 The Fan that new stadiums are built with the promise of a Super Bowl — much like Dallas hosted its first Super Bowl two years after the new facility opened.
He is correct that Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Francisco, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and New York have all hosted Super Bowls after the opening of new state-of-the-art stadiums. However, the Super Bowl is in Arizona this year after being there in 2015. The NFL also repeated other hits from the past and returned to Miami, New Orleans, Tampa and even Houston.
Dallas had its shot to be part of the rotation and missed badly. With February’s winter storms once again affecting transportation, it’s time to realize that the Metroplex shouldn’t be hosting a world spectacle like the Super Bowl that requires huge numbers of people to travel there during that time of year.
There are still plenty of other big events for the Jones Building to host and keep its elite in the public eye.