NFL Shouldn’t Miss Opportunity

That didn’t take long. Already we have a national sports controversy: What do we do with our country’s most prominent single sporting event, the Super Bowl, and how do we handle the playoffs?

How does the NFL offer a full 16-game regular-season schedule, provide a full slate of playoff rounds with a full roster of wild-card teams and its $100 million in broadcast income, and still have the Super Bowl in New Orleans on Jan. 27 when the time frame has been shortened by the week the league took off?

Does the NFL slash the number of wild-card teams from six to two and eliminate the first round of the playoffs? Or pay off the automobile dealers who have a hammerlock on New Orleans hotel rooms the week of Feb. 3 so as to have a full playoff schedule and a New Orleans Super Bowl on that date?

Or can the NFL move the Super Bowl back a week and out of New Orleans, enabling the league to have a regular playoff schedule and the auto dealers to have their convention as scheduled and without having to beg, grovel and make payoffs? Here’s a vote for that last one.

The NFL went back to work Sunday. The games were fine and fun. The Cincinnati Bengals beat the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens. The San Diego Chargers beat the Dallas Cowboys, “America’s Team.” These two powers, Bengals and Chargers, have combined for a 4-0 start and will play each other in one of the big games of Week 3.

So we can start letting our minds wander, try to figure out how it is the Chicago Bears beat the Minnesota Vikings, whether the Ravens will gain 50 yards rushing, wishing we had put $10 on the Chargers to win the Super Bowl.

Here’s where the Super Bowl should be: at the Rose Bowl. It should be a week later than scheduled. It should be played after a full slate of playoff games. And it should be played in front of a stadium filled with fans, real fans, people who didn’t get their tickets by being corporate executives or network and NFL buddies or clients of Super Bowl sponsors.

The 2002 Super Bowl should be played in front of firefighters and police officers from New York and other places. It should be played in front of children who lost parents in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. It should be a real celebration of strength and survival. That’s what the Super Bowl is for professional football teams. It is about strength and survival, about which team best endures a long season, which teams become better after injuries or controversies, which coach makes better adjustments game after game, which franchise is built to provide its players and staff with the best and most resources.

And the Super Bowl is a symbol of what sports is to this country. Super Bowl Sunday is practically a holiday. It is a day of parties and office pools. Newspaper food sections fill pages with Super Bowl party recipes. Feature sections give ideas on how to throw the best party. If you don’t watch the Super Bowl, you know someone who does. If you don’t go to a Super Bowl party, you were probably invited to one. This is an invitation to the NFL to invite someone different to this Super Bowl. Don’t spend millions to persuade the auto dealers to switch dates.

Save that pot-sweetener money, add it to the TV money that wouldn’t be lost. Move the big game from New Orleans but do give the tourist town the NFC and AFC championships games, both of them, as a consolation prize. Move the Super Bowl to a new stadium and a new week. No tickets have been sold yet for that new stadium and new date.

The Rose Bowl, for example, would offer an extra 25,000 seats for sale. The NFL wouldn’t lose millions of dollars. It could afford, for this one time, to make a gesture to our country, to its fans.

One estimate it that 5,000 children will have lost a parent when the final accounting of victims of the terrorist attacks is done. The NFL should offer those children and their families tickets to the Super Bowl.

And transportation and hotel rooms. Bring the families of all the New York firefighters, police officers, rescue workers, to the Super Bowl. If tickets remain, put them on sale for the rest of us. Don’t offer them as perks to the advertisers, sponsors, corporations. If those people want to be involved in the game, maybe they could donate the money they’d normally spend (on fun) for relief.

And for the fans of the teams that make it to the Super Bowl, let there be tickets available at something under a scalper’s ransom. On Sunday, while many NFL games were played, there was a prayer service held at Yankee Stadium. Instead of a flashy halftime show full of fireworks and flamboyance, bring back the ministers and rabbis and priests and imams from the Yankee Stadium service. Have Oprah Winfrey be the fulcrum. Have Bette Midler and Placido Domingo and Lee Greenwood and the Boys Choir of Harlem sing songs, both patriotic and sweet.

Make this Super Bowl something different, something that truly belongs to all of us. Make it a day to celebrate something other than the event. Make it a very Super Bowl.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.