For the second year in a row, the Super Bowl has been played at the home stadium of one of its participating teams.
And wouldn't you know — the home team won both of the games.
Maybe the Rams "deserved" to play Sunday's Super Bowl at their place, since they finished two games ahead of the Bengals. But the year before, not only did the Buccaneers, who hosted Super Bowl LVI, finish three games behind the Chiefs, but they didn't even win their division.
(There have also been two "almost" home-field Super Bowls — when the Rams lost to the Steelers 31-19 in Super Bowl XIV at Pasadena's Rose Bowl, in which a missed extra point by Rams kicker Frank Corral made the difference as to who covered the spread because Pittsburgh was an 11.5-point favorite, and Super Bowl XIX, which saw the 49ers trounce the Dolphins 38-16 in a game played at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, California).
But what are the alternatives?
The most plausible alternative is to hold the game at a truly neutral site — that is to say, a non-NFL site, and better yet, a past — and/or future — NFL site.
Specific venues can include San Antonio's Alamodome, where the Saints played three games in 2005 due to Hurricane Katrina, Oakland's RingCentral Coliseum (the former home of the Raiders), the Dome at America's Center, known as the Edward Jones Dome when the Rams played their home games there from mid-1995 (after having played their first four home games that year at Busch Stadium) through 2015, Birmingham's Legion Field (especially if the new USFL, which begins its inaugural season, with all of its games being played there, in April, proves successful), and the soon-to-be-opened Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego (the new home of San Diego State's football team), even though its maximum 55,000-seat capacity is smaller than that of any NFL stadium.
The major virtue of this approach is that if Super Bowls at these sites are comparably successful — naturally using the almighty dollar as the measuring rod — to those played heretofore at sites that have an NFL franchise, it strengthens the argument for future expansion teams in these cities.
Another alternative is for the NFL to do what all of the other sports do: Give the home-field advantage to the team that finished with the better regular-season record — with one caveat: in no case can a wild-card team get home field over a division champion, regardless of team records.
But what if the two conference champions had the same record (and either both teams won their respective divisions, or neither team did)? In 2020, the NFL implemented inter-conference tie-breaking procedures for determining draft order of teams that finished with both the same record and played the same strength of schedule (in this case, however, strength of schedule would be the fourth tie-breaker, after head-to-head, record against common opponents, and strength of victory).
Besides giving the team that earned it the home field, doing this would essentially do away with these distressing "Siesta Bowls" at the end of the season, because in just about every single case, teams will be battling for something even in the last week of the regular season — and who envisioned the Super Bowl matchup we ended up with in the just-concluded season?
But what about the halftime show, you ask? That can be performed at a remote location, such as Los Angeles or Miami, or even New York (indoors in the last instance, of course).
In any event, what the NFL is doing now cannot be allowed to continue. In the immortal words of Roberto Duran: "No mas, no mas."
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