(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Packers 'shareholders' want Super Bowl at Lambeau, but there's a problem
Lambeau Stadium would be a remarkable, history-rich place to watch a Super Bowl. But there's at least one huge problem that, unless changed, will keep that from happening.
July 24, 2017 at 7:06PM
The Green Bay Packers have 363,948 shareholders — those who have bought "stock" in the team, which is not stock in the traditional sense of it being a monetary asset — and several thousand of them are meeting Monday in the annual shareholders meeting at Lambeau Field.
This is their yearly chance to meet up and hear from Packers executives — "the one day per year that the investment becomes more tangible than the piece of paper framed in your den," as Pro Football Talk put it — and according to Tom Silverstein of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the subject of bringing a Super Bowl to Lambeau Field was brought up by the shareholders.
Now, here is the part when I turn off the sarcasm and Packer-fan teasing for a moment to say that a Super Bowl at Lambeau Field would be pretty awesome. It's a remarkable, history-rich place to watch a game and it would almost certainly bring the elements of a frigid winter into play given the stadium is outdoors and the Super Bowl is in early February.
That all said: It would also be a logistical nightmare — or, one step further, an impossibility. Per Silverstein, CEO Mark Murphy addressed the question by reminding shareholders that the NFL requires a Super Bowl host city to have 30,000 hotel rooms within the vicinity of the game. Green Bay? It only has 8,000.
Long story short? Until the NFL eases those restrictions or officially partners with Airbnb … or until Green Bay decides to quadruple its hotel room output … a Super Bowl in Titletown simply isn't happening. The closest they might get is in six months, when Minneapolis hosts the game.
Mike Conley was in Minneapolis, where he sounded the Gjallarhorn at the Vikings game, on Sunday during the robbery.
