The San Francisco 49ers, the City and County of San Francisco, SF Mayor Ed Lee, and the San Francisco Super Bowl 50 Bidding Committee just, today, officially submitted it’s bid to host the 50th Super Bowl at the new 49ers Stadium in Santa Clara to the National Football League today.
While the bid’s official contents are being witheld until May 21st, P.J. Johnston, the committee’s spokesperson, said that “It must have fireworks. We want to hold back to ‘wow’ the owners on the day that they vote for Super Bowl 50.”
That day will be May 21st at the Boston Spring NFL Owners Meeting. There, the NFL Owners will decide if San Francisco or Miami gets to host Super Bowl 50, and then if one of those cities or Houston is the choice for Super Bowl 51.
Johnston told CBS San Francisco “The bid will emphasize the “state of the art,” $1.2 billion Santa Clara stadium project, and will highlight the Bay Area as a “beautiful, exciting and vibrant” region that has the infrastructure to handle the influx of about 70,000 people for the game and related events.
From past experience, this blogger can share that Super Bowl bid presentations range from the basic talk, which is what Oakland did because we didn’t have a large budget, but we had Jerry Brown, to what Detroit did for its bid for the 2006 Super Bowl.
On that day, November 3rd 2000 in Atlanta, the Oakland was there with Detroit. Our Oakland Super Bowl delegation consisted of then-Mayor Jerry Brown, then-City Manager Robert Bobb, the-Alameda County Supervisor Gail Steele, Gary Bauer of Bauer’s Transportation, Beth Schnitzer, then of Pier 39, and now of Spritz Marketing, and myself.
As we were waiting for our turn to present, Gary had somehow gotten away from us, and walked into Detroit’s presentation. As we were getting closer to our turn, I got nervous and started looking for Gary. Just at that moment, he came out with a group of people and said “I just saw Detroit and they’ve got a float.”
What the producers of Detroit’s Super Bowl Bid did was make a three-way turntable that a person could walk in, and with models of Ford Field and other Detroit venue that would play host in their bid, and did in the execution of it. The person who walked it it was Dennis Archer, then the Mayor of Detroit; Larry Alexander was the head of Detroit’s bid, and the boss of the convention and visitor’s bureau there.. I don’t know what it cost to make it, but just from what I was told, I’d estimate it at around $80,000 to $100,000.
That’s the kind of presentation the NFL’s used to seeing.
As I’ve said before, I thought we were in the tank, but then-Mayor and now Governor Jerry Brown gave the one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard in my life. That speech, alone, was worth $100,000.
Stay tuned.