With a new Minnesota Vikings stadium now being built, Gov. Mark Dayton turned Monday to the National Football League to make good on a vague promise to give the state a second Super Bowl.
The governor announced a campaign to lobby the NFL for a Super Bowl at the new stadium for as early as 2018, and speculated that the game would produce nearly a half-billion dollars for the area. Just hours after Dayton outlined the effort, the NCAA announced that the Vikings' indoor stadium — which will open in 2016 — was also a finalist to host a Final Four men's basketball tournament as early as 2017.
"It's our time. It's our moment, and we're ready," said U.S. Bancorp Chief Executive Richard Davis, one of three prominent business leaders Dayton named to head the campaign. "It's like in Hollywood when they say, 'I'm ready for my close-up.' "
For Dayton and the Vikings, the State Capitol news conference came two years after both the governor and the team used the lure of a Super Bowl to persuade legislators to adopt a controversial public subsidy package for the $1 billion stadium in downtown Minneapolis. Vikings officials said they are confident that the NFL, as it has done in the past, will award the game to Minnesota as an acknowledgment of the new stadium. Both the team and the NFL implied, but did not directly commit to, bringing a Super Bowl to Minnesota during the legislative process.
While Minnesota is already one of three finalists for the Super Bowl in 2018, hurdles — both logistical and image-related — remain for the Vikings, Dayton and civic leaders. Monday's lobbying effort came as most schools in Minnesota were closed because of the cold, and the temperature Monday never reached zero. The 2018 Super Bowl will be held Feb. 4.
Monday's campaign launch also immersed boosters into the always-murky debate of how much actual economic boost a Super Bowl would provide. While the governor's office released a study showing the Super Bowl had produced $384 million in spending in Indianapolis in 2012, economists nationally have regularly disputed such projections.
This Sunday's Super Bowl at an open-air stadium in New Jersey may also affect Minnesota's chances: Weather for the game is expected to be in the 30s, and the New York City area recently had a major snowfall. Even Dayton, at a morning news conference Monday, joked that the NFL "might want to reconsider their policy after this one."
But the governor said that Minneapolis, in hosting its first and only Super Bowl in 1992, had won high praise from NFL officials and had erased the negative feelings of having a Super Bowl in a northern city that lingered after a snowstorm snarled traffic in Detroit at the 1982 Super Bowl at the Silverdome, a covered stadium. "We've proven it in Minnesota already," Dayton said. "We know how to handle a cold-weather" Super Bowl.
