Three years ago, the cancellation of the Bills-Bengals game following Damar Hamlin’s on-field cardiac arrest prompted the league to handle the multi-layered competitive imbalances by deciding that a Bills-Chiefs AFC Championship would have been played at a neutral site.
If the Bills had beaten the Bengals in the divisional round, Buffalo would have faced Kansas City in Atlanta. Where 50,000 tickets had been sold in only 24 hours, based on the mere possibility of the game happening there.
The Bengals disrupted that plan by upsetting the Bills, but the plan prompted talk within the league office of potentially shifting all conference championship games to neutral sites.
Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt had pushed the idea for years; his partners consistently shot it down. And when the concept emerged three years ago, it quickly fizzled out. (Steelers owner Art Rooney II said, “I hate the idea.” Falcons owner Arthur Blank, whose domed stadium surely would be in the rotation, also opposed it.)
During the fourth quarter of Sunday’s AFC Championship, it suddenly seemed to be not such a bad idea.
That’s the balance. On one hand, the team that earns the higher seed deserves to play at home. On the other hand, the biggest games arguably should be played under conditions that prevent weather from impacting the outcome.
The Super Bowl has always been played at a neutral site. And weather is rarely an issue. (The NFL got lucky in February 2014, with the first — and only — open-air cold-climate Super Bowl in New Jersey. It got unlucky in February 2007, when it rained cats and dogs throughout Colts and Bears in Miami.)
With more teams ditching cold-weather, unroofed venues for domes (as recently noted by Sports Business Journal, the league is on track to have up to 17 teams playing indoors within the next decade, with the Chiefs, Browns, Broncos, and Bears looking to create fully-covered year-round cash cows), the chances of late-January weather impacting conference championships will be reduced. But with the Bills, Jets, Patriots, Steelers, Bengals, Giants, Eagles, Packers, Panthers, and Seahawks playing outdoors in cities that could introduce snow, ice, and/or bitter cold into the wintry mix, the prospect of weather affecting conference title games will remain — especially if/when the regular season expands and the playoffs are nudged deeper into the calendar.
Plenty of fans will huff and puff about neutral-site conference championships. And then they’ll gobble up the tickets and/or hunker down to watch the games by the tens of millions.
After Sunday, here’s the overriding question. Are we OK with staging those games in places where the conditions could make them both unplayable and unwatchable? Do we want the team that was trailing once the skies opened and the snow accumulated to have no realistic chance to come back and win?
Yes, the Broncos had a chance to tie things up late, but a field-goal attempt was tipped at the line of scrimmage. If that kick had been good, however, there’s a good chance the Patriots and Broncos would have lingered through multiple overtimes, until some fluke occurrence allowed one of the teams to score.
If that’s what we want, fine. If it’s not, maybe it’s time to revisit Lamar Hunt’s annual suggestion.
