Get ready San Francisco and Houston!! The Super Bowl is headed your way!! The announcement was just made.
Details after the jump…
Via ESPN:
The San Francisco Bay Area was awarded hosting rights to Super Bowl L in 2016, while Houston will host Super Bowl LI in 2017, commissioner Roger Goodell announced at the NFL’s spring owners meetings in Boston on Tuesday.
NFL owners were deciding between finalists San Francisco and South Florida for the right to host the prestigious 50th Super Bowl. Owners picked between South Florida and Houston for the 51st Super Bowl.
The 49ers’ new stadium in Santa Clara is being built and is scheduled to open for the 2014 season. Only once has the Bay Area staged a Super Bowl, in 1985 at Stanford Stadium.
The Dolphins were denied public money for a stadium upgrade, compromising their Super Bowl bids. Multibillionaire Dolphins owner Stephen Ross contends $350 million in stadium improvements are badly needed, but he doesn’t want to pay for them by himself. Nor does he want a scaled-down renovation of the 26-year-old facility.
Miami has hosted 10 Super Bowls, tied with New Orleans for the most. All of the South Florida title games have been successful, although the only outdoor Super Bowl played in the rain was held there in 2007 when Peyton Manning and the Colts won the championship.
For years, it was thought the NFL would seek to stage the 50th Super Bowl in Los Angeles, where the first one was played (but did not sell out) on Jan. 15, 1967. But with no franchise in LA and no suitable stadium projects approved, that hope disappeared.
Next Feb. 2, the game goes outdoors in a cold-weather site for the first time, at MetLife Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands. If that gamble pays off for the NFL, look for other cities in similar climates — Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver — to bid for future Super Bowls.
The league also has expressed great satisfaction with how Indianapolis handled the big game in 2012. New Orleans is a regular bidder, and Goodell has said the power outage during last year’s game will not impact voting on the Big Easy hosting another Super Bowl.
The 2015 game will be played in the Phoenix area.
