Should Jonestown get another Super Bowl?

I'm going to say no unless the area completely changes its approach to hosting the game and I doubt that is ever going to happen, given its competitive nature.

I am willing to give North Central Texas a pass on the weather. Next year's Super Bowl is going to be played in Indianapolis and in 2014 it will be played in New York. Both those cities have a lot better chance for bitter weather than our area does. The problem, however, lies in the nouns I just chose to use: "cities" and "area." The RCA Dome is located in downtown Indianapolis. I went to a game in the old Indianapolis domed stadium and I could walk from my hotel to my seat in the stadium three blocks away and never have to go outside. And as DFW has bragged about since the day it opened, it's larger than the entire island of Manhattan.

The problem with the setup here was that everything was way too spread out. In weather where motorists were finding it difficult to get from the Park Cities to downtown Dallas, you can't try to host events in Dallas, Fort Worth, Grapevine and Arlington and expect it to work. Of course, we wouldn't be having this discussion if the old Dallas County commissioners hadn't played partisan politics and let Jonestown escape to Arlington, but that, unfortunately, is no longer a debatable issue. The stadium is where it is and that's that. But the first thing that must happen for another Super Bowl to come here is that the hosts must surrender, temporarily, this stupid notion of shared regionalism.

Now Arlington can't be the host city. The only reason Gertrude Stein said what she did about Oakland was because she had never been to Arlington. But if Jonestown ever hopes to stage another one of these games it must decide to name either Dallas OR Fort Worth the host city and allow everything to be concentrated in that host city, just as everything has been concentrated in the host city for all 44 previous Super Bowls and will be the case when the game is played in Indianapolis and New York City.

But I think the ticket debacle is going to hurt Jonestown's image more than the weather. You simply can't turn away 800 people, who had legitimate tickets, who paid their airfares and their hotel bills for thise once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I will give credit to the NFL which is trying to make it right, even though it can't ever make this right. It says it will refund these fans triple the face value of their tickets and they will be the NFL's guest at next year's game in Indy. But what if these folks were die hard Steelers or Packers fans? Will the event mean anything to them if next year's Super Bowl is between, say, Baltimore and Atlanta? This was more unforgivable than the weather. Someone -- and it should have been someone connected with Jonestown -- should have known before those tickets were sold that they should never have been offered.

So, should Jonestown host another Super Bowl? The stadium is too spectacular to shun it forever. But the host committee is going to have to convince the NFL that the debacle of the past week will not be repeated. It must designate a host city and compact all events into that host city (which, I'm afraid, might be impossible, due to the competitive nature of the cities in the area) and it must prove that there will be absolutely no chance that ticket fiasco will be repeated.