Christie Tells Letterman: Goodell “Didn’t Seem to Care One Bit” About Super Bowl XLVII Power Outage
By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
I don’t think it was meant as an indictment of the NFL Commissioner’s job performance, Save Jerseyans. Quite the opposite! But post-Sandy Chris Christie is viewed as the nation’s foremost expert on leadership in crisis, and he provided an interesting account of Roger Goodell’s demeanor during the bizarre power outage at Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans during last night’s interview with David Letterman.
Christie was, after all, sitting in his box when the lights went out (h/t Newsbusters):
Text of the exchange is below the fold…
LETTERMAN: Governor Chris Christie is with us, and we were just talking about he was at the Super Bowl last night, and you were sitting, with you were the parents of the two coaches.
CHRISTIE: Yeah, the Harbaughs.
LETTERMAN: The Harbaughs. And what was that like? Because both sons, I mean really what did they want to happen there?
CHRISTIE: They sat there very quiet most of the night. You know, there was no clapping, no cheering. They looked almost physically in pain for most of the game. They really did. And I felt awful for them. They’re just wonderful people, I mean really kind, nice people. We had conversations during timeouts, or at halftime. But they were, they were really wonderful folks, but they were clearly in misery.
LETTERMAN: One wonders what you would do in that situation being a parent for God sakes.
CHRISTIE: I mean how do you pick?
LETTERMAN: And the NFL guy, Roger Goodell, he was with you last night?
CHRISTIE: Yeah, I was in his box.
LETTERMAN: What happened when the lights went out?
CHRISTIE: He didn’t seem to care one bit actually. He was eating some popcorn, checking his Blackberry. He seemed relatively unconcerned, and I looked and I said, “That’s leadership, look at this guy.” He figured he’s got people who are working on this.
Of course he had people working on it. The outage was a stadium issue and stadium operations personnel handled it. The only thing Goodell could possibly have done is have a P.R. staffer issue a statement saying that gas lights take 15-20 minutes to reach full power after re-striking. Other than that, any interaction he may have had with stadium personnel would've only served to delay their response.