Super Bowl or super brrr? Big game coming to NY

NEW YORK (AP) - Amy Freeze can talk football and forecasts.

So with the Super Bowl coming to New York next year, and with local temperatures stuck in the teens, the WABC-TV meteorologist was all set to look ahead.

“Football fans like a little winter weather,” she offered on a windy Wednesday.

OK, but exactly how wintry?

Try this long-range reckoning for the matchup at MetLife Stadium, from the soon-to-be printed Farmers’ Almanac: “An intense storm, heavy rain, snow and strong winds. This could seriously impact Super Bowl XLVIII.”

Predicts editor Pete Geiger: “This is going to be one for the ages.”

“Hey, it goes with the territory,” he said by phone from Lewiston, Maine.

Way too early to say for sure what awaits fans and players in the first outdoor Super Bowl at a cold-weather site. It’ll be held Feb. 2, 2014, at the building shared by the Giants and Jets in East Rutherford, N.J.

The record low for a Super Bowl kickoff is 39 degrees when Dallas beat Miami in January 1972 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans. It will be a lot warmer back in the Big Easy when the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers tangle in less than two weeks. They’ll be inside the Superdome.

The NFL was aware next year’s Super Bowl could be a super brrr.

“Creating a plan for staging a Super Bowl in winter weather is not reinventing the wheel,” NFL senior vice president for events Frank Supovitz said two years ago. “Super Bowls have often been played in cities that can experience winter storms, including Detroit, Minneapolis …”

“Coordinated snow and ice removal plans for travel routes, major event facilities, the stadium campus, and parking have always been part of our planning protocol,” he said then.

Remember, no city is immune to rugged weather. Even though Green Bay and Pittsburgh played inside Cowboys Stadium two years, snow and ice blanketed the lead-up events.

Besides, a blizzard isn’t likely. The National Weather Service said the average high in nearby Newark, N.J., on Feb. 2 is 39.8 degrees and the low is 24.2. The average precipitation on that date going back to 1931 is about one-eighth of an inch.

The only significant precipitation during a Super Bowl came in February 2007 at Miami. Playing in a rainstorm, Indianapolis and Chicago committed four turnovers in the first quarter.

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