We're enduring another round of winter weather here in north Texas.
Dallas looks a lot like it did last week, with freezing rain and a little snow.
An acquaintance of mine posted this on Facebook today. It kind of sums things up.
There were a lot of people who complained about the terrible weather we had here in the days just before Sunday's Super Bowl.
A Super Bowl should always be played in a warm–weather city, they said. Well, good luck finding one that also happens to meet the NFL's requirement that a city cannot host a Super Bowl unless it also has an NFL franchise.
Fact is, this is pretty unusual weather for Dallas. I've lived here for most of the last 22 years, and I visited here on a regular basis when I was a child — and on rare occasions it does get cold and it does snow, but mostly what we get around here when it gets cold is ice.
We don't get that much of it around here, anyway. Besides, the weekend before the Super Bowl was balmy.
That's the kind of thing people are accustomed to around here. The weather can change in the blink of an eye — except in the summer, when it rarely deviates from "hot" and stays that way from April to October.
The people from Pittsburgh and Green Bay who were whining about Texans' "wimpy" responses to the winter weather need to come down here sometime in the summer — when the temperature is over 100°.
They'll find that most Texans are accepting of the heat. They expect it every year. They may not like the high utility bills or having to get in cars that have been sitting exposed to the summer heat all day, but it doesn't catch them by surprise. It's part of the bargain they made when they decided to live here.
But ice and snow wasn't part of that deal. That's why all those Packer fans and Steeler fans found there were no snow plows around here to make it easy for them to get around last week. Snow plows would be an unconscionable waste of public funds — and that is in the best of times.
It has been said that Jerry Jones wants to bring the Super Bowl back to Dallas for the 50th anniversary in February 2016. It has also been said that many folks want to play that game in Los Angeles. That is where the first Super Bowl was played, and L.A. is, after all, a warm–weather location.
But L.A., once home to two NFL franchises, is now home to none. Either an existing franchise will have to move there, or a new franchise will have to be created there — or the NFL will have to change its own rules.
And even if the NFL does change its rules, there are very few American cities, even L.A., that can promise mild, sunny weather in February. The best any can do is to point to the historical trend and claim that the odds favor one thing or another — and that trend in Dallas has generally favored mostly mild conditions.
But anything can happen here, as the cartoon above clearly illustrates. Texans know that. That's why they can sit back and chuckle about a Super Bowl that didn't produce the kind of economic windfall they expected because the weather turned nasty.
That's Texas for you, they're surely saying today. The temperatures were really nice the weekend before the Super Bowl. If everything had been done a week earlier, it would have paid off the way everyone hoped and expected.
Texans have reputations for being gamblers, and I suspect that most would understand what a friend and former co–worker (and frequent gambler) used to say about sure things.
There's no such thing, he would say, as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
Scheduling a Super Bowl in north Texas was a gamble — weatherwise.
I'm sorry if it disappointed our visitors from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. I would have liked to oblige them by providing them with sunny skies and warm temperatures during their visit, and, as I say, if everything had been held a week earlier, we could have.
But the weather turned on us. It was one of those Texas things.
All things considered, I'll take the winter we're having over the one they're having.
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