The first half of the Super Bowl was a bit of a letdown, which was exactly what the organizers wanted 12 years ago. No controversies, no trouble, nothing to worry about. Even Beyoncé’s halftime show went off without a hitch.
To tell the truth, the game wasn’t all that great either. When Jacoby Jones scored a touchdown early in the second half with a 108-yard return, the famous “Harbaugh Bowl” – between John’s team, the Baltimore Ravens, and Jim’s, the San Francisco 49ers – looked like it was going to end in a landslide.
Meanwhile, back at the Superdome in New Orleans, inside the electronic fortress of “Control,” NFL events chief Frank Supovitz finally managed to relax a bit. The CBS crew was filming the behind-the-scenes footage of the Super Bowl for “60 Minutes.” It was a good time for him to give an interview and let his guard down a bit.
He was standing there at Control, with his back to the field, when CBS reporter Armen Keteyian asked him a question. But before Supovitz could finish answering, Keteyian interrupted.
“Oh my,” Keteyian said. “This is not good.”
Supovitz turned and, calmly looking down at the dark arena below, said, “Okay. We’re out of lights.”
“You could see it in his eyes. It got pretty dark out there at NFL Control,” Supovitz recalled in an interview. “Usually when you have a ’60 Minutes’ crew around and something goes wrong, it’s a bad day.”
It wasn’t pretty, especially in the early moments, when half the Superdome lost power out of nowhere during Super Bowl XLVII and no one had any idea why. There was confusion on the field, uncertainty in the stands, and fear for some of the roughly 75,000 fans, players, officials, workers and media in the dark.
In that moment, it was clear that the legacy of that Super Bowl would not be the final game of Ray Lewis’s Hall of Fame career, Colin Kaepernick’s final moment on the NFL’s biggest stage, the Harbaugh Bowl, the 49ers’ tumultuous but ultimately futile comeback, or the Ravens’ eventual 34-31 victory.
That Super Bowl on February 3, 2013 – the last one held in New Orleans before another – will always be remembered for the 34 minutes in the dark.
‘We never simulate an electrical failure’
The week before the Super Bowl, when people started to fill Bourbon Street, there were already signs of what was about to happen. During a rehearsal for Beyoncé’s show, there were some power problems, according to people involved in the preparation, including some lights going out.
The NFL was confident they had it figured out, and no one was worried it would happen again. In fact, a week before the game, at a Hyatt hotel near the stadium, Supovitz led what he called a “tabletop simulation” of the Super Bowl for several hours, involving everyone who would have a decision-making role in running the NFL. They imagined all sorts of disasters and emergency situations, and how they would deal with them.
Or almost all of them.
“In all the years we’ve done this,” Supovitz said, “we’ve never simulated a power outage.”
“But that’s okay,” he added. “Because what it did was prepare us to deal with anything.”
They were in the right place on game night. “Control” was a room full of advanced technology and experts in various fields. “We have eyes on everything,” said Brian McCarthy, the NFL’s vice president of communications who was there that night. The room had “multiple screens with views from every possible angle inside and outside the stadium.”
All critical information passed through there. All the responsible people from each relevant department were there.
“That,” McCarthy said, “is the nerve center of the Super Bowl.”
And for the first few minutes of the blackout, it was the only place where anyone could get any information about what was going on.
‘Is this one of those 9/11 type events?’
At that point, the only things that were known were the basics. The Ravens controlled the first half of the game, taking a 21-6 lead behind three touchdown passes from Joe Flacco. Beyoncé’s concert was spectacular, and the lights that accompanied the show worked perfectly. The league and SMG, the company that managed the Superdome, decided during the week before the game to move all of the power for Beyoncé’s concert to an outside source, and it worked wonderfully.
After it was over, the stadium lights came back on and the match continued.
Then Jones scored on a return kickoff in the second half, and the 49ers ran it three more times — the last resulting in a sack on Kaepernick. On the CBS broadcast, analyst Phil Simms was analyzing the sack mistake when his voice trailed off mid-sentence. The broadcast continued with the replay, now muted, for another 12 seconds before cutting to a shot of players standing on the field.
It was only clear to the 164 million viewers around the world that at 7:38 p.m. local time in New Orleans, the Superdome lights had gone out when they showed Ravens coach John Harbaugh dimly lit on the sideline.
“I remember the first thing I thought was, ‘Is this one of those 9/11 events?’” Solomon Wilcots, one of CBS’s field reporters that day, said. “I thought, ‘What’s going on here? Are we safe?’ Then I started walking towards the tunnel because I saw some people from the league gathering, and I started asking ‘Hey, what’s going on here?
“But no one knew how to say.”
That was because no one really knew. And it would be a while before anyone outside Control got any information. It wasn’t pitch black in there. Only the lights and power on the west side had gone out. But there was an eerie feeling looking out at the shadowed field and the press box bleachers high above, and the information blackout only made it worse.
‘Feel that feeling in your stomach’
When the lights went out, Supovitz admitted “We didn’t know” if it was terrorism at first. All they knew was that the lights on the west side were out, indicating that one of the two cables bringing power to the stadium had “gone.” They quickly discovered that everything was out in the west—lights, escalators, the credit card machines at the concession stands. Even elevators got stuck with fans inside.
Remarkably, there was no panic, despite the fear that might have been felt by some inside the dome. Supovitz, the guy in charge of the event, said he went into “response mode,” as did everyone around him at Control.
“It was almost like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean, but with world-class sailors, knowing we were in good hands,” McCarthy said. “They were the best of the best in each of their fields. So there was never a sense of panic.”
“We were all anxious,” Supovitz added. “We weren’t panicking, but of course you get that feeling in your stomach. And our job is to get back up and running, so that’s what we did.”
As players tried to stay loose, and fans sang the opening lines of “Seven Nation Army” a cappella as they looked around in the dark, things at Control were moving quickly. Supovitz said it took less than two minutes for police to rule out terrorism, a citywide power outage or a fire. And it took even less time for coaches to plot their next steps.
Stadium operations personnel began turning off the air conditioning, escalators, refrigerators, and some excessive lights so that the one working power supply wouldn’t overload. After about eight minutes, they diagnosed and fixed the problem and began turning the lights back on. But these were old, pre-LED lights that needed about 10 minutes to warm up.
By then, there was a sense that the crowd was getting restless. The NFL had someone monitoring social media, and Supovitz said they noticed “people starting to talk about whether they should leave the building.” The league had already determined that the venue was safe and the situation could be resolved, but they needed to tell fans that before they decided to leave. In the frantic opening minutes, there was no communication to the crowd.
So they wrote a message on a piece of paper for the sound man to read to the fans, which he could do because his system had a battery backup for just such situations. But of course, the sound booth was on a different floor from Control. So Supovitz sent someone running up the stairs to deliver the script.
“We couldn’t reach him by phone or walkie talkie because all those systems were down,” Supovitz said. “And he wisely didn’t say anything until we handed him a script to read.”
The message was simple — basically “Stay calm.”
‘They tell me it won’t happen again’
CBS eventually cut to commercials while they worked to get the broadcast back in full. Eventually, they were able to get Steve Tasker, their sideline reporter for the 49ers, to describe the scene. There was still no way to get Simms and Jim Nantz back on the air.
Wilcots eventually managed to connect his equipment to a landline in the field to communicate back with the broadcast truck. But even that didn’t give him any clarity.
“They were in chaos,” he recalled. “They were trying to figure out how the league was doing, and how the stadium operations people were doing.”
And then they started spreading rumors.
“First they were saying it was a power outage in the city,” Wilcots said. “Then they were saying there was a drain on the generators by Beyoncé, and it happened during rehearsal. But there was no reliable source for that. It was just hearsay.”
The players were getting frustrated, too. “They were perplexed,” Wilcots recalled. “They were looking around like, ‘What’s going on?’
“Nobody knew anything (in the field). That was the disappointing part. It was hard to get to the people you thought should have the answers, and when you got to them, they didn’t have anything. That was frustrating.”
It was frustrating at Control, too, even as they began to troubleshoot the problem and waited for the lights to come back on. They came back on completely about 24 minutes after the first outage, but Supovitz delayed the restart of the game to check all the other systems. It was a good idea, because the Ravens’ coach-quarter communication system had also failed and needed fixing. They also had to reset the scoreboard clocks — frozen with 13:22 left in the third quarter — and check the instant replay system.
“We really went through each system one at a time to make sure everything was back up,” Supovitz said. “Because if you’re out for 24 minutes, what’s another 10 to get everything right?”
Then, and only then, did they finally send word to the field that Super Bowl play could resume. CBS sent the broadcast back to New Orleans where Nantz and Simms said the restart was one minute away. The players returned to their sidelines. The 49ers offense and the Ravens defense took the field. The ball was punted at the San Francisco 40-yard line.
And then referee Jerome Booger turned on his microphone — which was working again — and told the world: “Resume action. Third down and 13. Let’s go!”
This was a welcome relief for everyone watching inside the stadium and on TV — everywhere except back at Control. Supovitz was talking to Doug Thornton, SMG’s vice president, still going over everything to make sure nothing had been overlooked.
“I remember turning to him once, after everything was back together, and saying, ‘Okay, Doug, tell me this won’t happen again,’” Supovitz said. “And he said, ‘I can’t.’”
“That moment was probably the most sobering.”
‘Come on, make time fly’
It didn’t happen again. There wasn’t even a flicker in the lights or power systems for the rest of the game. But the Ravens seemed to run out of steam in the third quarter, while the 49ers mounted a ferocious comeback. They scored 17 unanswered points to turn a parade into a 28-23 game. They came within 5 yards of a game-winning touchdown late in the fourth quarter before three straight incompletions by Kaepernick ended their hopes with 1:46 to play.
The Ravens held on for a 34-31 victory, but that didn’t stop some of them from wondering what would have happened if the lights had stayed on. Conspiracy theories, in fact, were born in the press box shortly after the game ended.
“Jim Harbaugh, he’s got a trick up his sleeve, huh?” Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs said. “It was just too much at that moment, and then I saw him come into the little earpiece. He said, ‘Red team, execution.’ He gave order 66: ‘Lights out, slow the Ravens.’”
“I’m not going to accuse anybody of anything because I don’t know the facts,” Ray Lewis told NFL Films a few months later. “But you’re a billion-dollar corporation, and your lights go out? No. No way. … You can’t tell me somebody wasn’t sitting there saying, ‘The Ravens are going to run over them. Man, we better do something.’”
Of course, I wasn’t a rabid 49ers fan flipping a switch or pulling the plug. Still, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the blackout had an impact. Even John Harbaugh admitted that “it probably gave (the 49ers) a chance to get it together.”
And at that point, it was still unclear exactly what had happened and why. Even after the lights came back on, Thornton was sent running down to the field level—up the stairs because no one in that stadium wanted to get into the small, slow elevators so soon after a blackout—so he could monitor the situation from the electrical chamber.
Supovitz, meanwhile, sat there in Control hoping that whatever the technicians did to fix the problem would hold.
There were no guarantees.
“I would say I felt probably just as anxious, or maybe a little more, during the second half because we didn’t know if it was going to happen again,” Supovitz said. “We didn’t know what it was at the time. So every time the clock would stop, because someone went out of bounds or there was an incomplete pass, it was like, ‘Oh, come on. Keep running the clock.’
“’We want to get out of this without any more problems.’”
They eventually learned that the outage was caused by a faulty relay inside one of the two cables that brought power to the Superdome. Entergy, the local power company, took to Twitter shortly after the outage to insist that they were not responsible, but of course their equipment was eventually found to be the cause.
The blame game could wait, though. The most important part for Supovitz was that the game and the event were over and nothing else had gone wrong on his watch. The years of planning, the drills and discussions all added up to a textbook lesson in crisis management. A few years later, he even used the stories from Super Bowl XLVII in a book he wrote called “What to Do When Things Go Wrong.”
And three days after the game was over, after fans, teams, media and workers had been allowed to leave through the exits without any hassles, he was still able to watch the behind-the-scenes segment of Showtime’s short-lived “60 Minutes Sports” and relive each terrifying moment with a sense of pride.
“It brought back memories of what we did,” Supovitz recalled. “When you’re in the middle of it, you’re not internalizing anything. You’re just responding and doing what needs to be done to keep the game going. So the fact that ‘60 Minutes’ was there wasn’t a bad thing, to show that we handled it as professionally as possible.”
In the end, he said, it was a “success” because they were able to restart the game and keep everyone safe. But there’s no doubt that his favorite part, his fondest memory of Super Bowl XLVII, was the moment when it was finally over, and the lights could be turned off as planned.
“Seriously,” Supovitz recalled, “it was a tremendous relief to get to the end.”
