BID NUMBERS

How many cream cheese packets can Roger Staubach juggle? It took putting together a Super Bowl bid to find out

Steve Pate

Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 11:41am

Two years ago this month, Tara Green, Roger Staubach and numerous civic-minded North Texans attended the meeting in Nashville that changed history.

Green, the North Texas Host Committee’s chief operating officer, and Staubach, the chairman who called all the right signals, huddled in a hotel suite while waiting to learn which U.S. bid city would be handed the 2011 Super Bowl at that NFL Owners Meeting.

Green had never been on a private plane before boarding the jet of the Jones Family, owners of the Cowboys, for Nashville. Many took commercial flights. But once the winning bid was announced, the Hunt Family loaded up a large band of North Texans so that the group could celebrate as one on the return home.

One has always been the key number to this North Texas effort — bringing the entire region together as one to stage the area’s most enormous entertainment event ever.

But there are other numbers, as well, that Green provides.

To wit:

244 – The number of pages contained in the winning bid.

13 – The lucky number of chapters in the bid.

24,000 – The number of hotel rooms already under contract, assuring the NFL that North Texas could handle the incoming traffic.

12 – The Convention & Visitors Bureaus from the four-county area that pitched in to help win the bid.

7,000 – The number of rental cars that the Host Committee assured will be available.

600 – The number of available buses.

3 – The number of cream cheese packets Staubach managed to juggle, successfully anyway, in the hotel suite while trying to alleviate the jitters of those present.

2 – The number of times Tara Green’s Blackberry went off at the podium as North Texas accepted the bid. “One,” she says, “was from someone I don’t even know, wanting a job with the Host Committee. The other was someone wanting tickets.”

642 – As of May 4, 2009, the number of days remaining before kickoff.