Super Bowl XLV Comes to North Texas

Super Bowl XLV comes to JerryWorld on Sunday and some 150,000 visitors are coming to North Texas to enjoy Texas hospitality, unfortunately we've been bombarded with snow and ice and it just, well, no other way to say it - SUCKS. DFW is en fuego anyway with ESPN taking over downtown Fort Worth. Here is the Omni Fort Worth where the Pittsburgh Steelers are staying.

Here is Cowboys Stadium before the ice and snow arrived.

On Monday, my BFF and I went to downtown Fort Worth to Sundance Square where ESPN started broadcasting. Here is Collin Cowherd with The Herd. It was pretty cool to watch and get on camera upon occasion. We missed our chance to get those big ugly red ESPN cowboy foam hats. We tried.

The Fort Worth Mounted Police are always good for public relations when people come to Cowtown.

Here is my BFF and I in Sundance Square in downtown Fort Worth on Monday. The Texas Roadhouse armadillo got tossed right after we took this photo. Apparently they didn't have permission from the NFL to be there.

Here is the Omni Mandalay in Irving. It's where the Green Bay Packers are staying.

And, my Super Bowl XLV t-shirt. I also bought a shot glass. :) When it comes to picking a winner, the experts at Jones Lang LaSalle claim they can successfully select Sunday’s champ by analyzing the commercial real estate climate in each team’s hometown. JLL’s analysis: teams based in cities with a higher percentage of vacant office space have won the Lombardi Trophy nearly two-thirds of the time since 2000. Roger says as a student of football and CRE, the vacancy rate hypothesis is the real deal. So congrats, Green Bay! As of Jan. 1, the office vacancy rate in Pittsburgh held steady at 12.1% (one of the lowest nationwide) while Green Bay reported vacancy of 18.9%, pointing to the likelihood of the first Packers Super Bowl title since 1997. Roger, who led the Cowboys to victories in Super Bowl VI and Super Bowl XII, denies that this year’s prediction is at all related to the fact that he lost two Super Bowls (X and XIII) at the hands of the Steelers in the 1970s.

Here is the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas. Repping the NFC, Dallas was lit in blue all this week and Fort Worth was lit in red for the AFC. It was cool. Only damper to the festivities has been the bad weather. It has been so bad in North Texas that we had 800 American Airlines flights in and out of DFW Airport canceled on Tuesday. DART light rail didn't run then either. Dallas Love Field was closed part of today. All the local school districts have been closed Tuesday-Friday. Rolling power outages were going on around Texas on Wednesday, too. Fun stuff. Not.