The Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins were set to play one of the coldest games in NFL history on Saturday night, yet that didn’t stop hundreds of fans from lining up outside the parking lots of Arrowhead Stadium more than 12 hours before kickoff.
At least they made it to the stadium.
The NFL was concerned that nobody could make it Sunday in Buffalo, where up to a couple of feet of snow was expected overnight. So, the league and New York officials decided to postpone the Bills’ wild-card playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers until Monday.
“We want our Bills to win,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said at a news conference in suburban Buffalo, “but we don’t want 60,000 to 70,000 people traveling to the football game in what’s going to be horrible conditions.”
The snow wasn’t the problem in Kansas City, though more was falling Saturday morning — it was expected to finish long before the Chiefs and Dolphins kicked off. Rather, the concern was what the National Weather Service called “dangerously cold” wind chills, which could make the forecasted temperature of minus-2 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-18 degrees Celsius) at kickoff feel like minus-24.
There have been only four postseason games played in subzero temperatures in NFL history, the most recent the 2007 NFC title game between the Giants and Packers, when it was minus-3 at kickoff. New York won 23-20 at Lambeau Field in a game perhaps best remembered for the images of Giants coach Tom Coughlin’s frozen face on the sideline.
The coldest game in league history remains minus-13 for the 1967 NFL championship, when the Packers beat the Cowboys at Lambeau Field in a game that came to be known as the Ice Bowl. The wind chill that day was minus-48 degrees.
“We definitely had that initial shock when we looked at the forecast,” said Chiefs season ticket holder Keaton Schlatter, who was driving down from West Des Moines, Iowa, for Saturday night’s game. “We thought about maybe posting our tickets for…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/dolphins-chiefs-matchup-could-approach-nfl-record-for-coldest-game
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Publish date : 2024-01-13 20:02:17
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