National Football League

Goodell: Displaced fans to be rewarded

Published Feb. 7, 2011 12:00 a.m. ET

foxsports

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell promised Monday to take care of the approximately 400 fans who did not have a seat at Sunday night's game due to problems with temporary seating at Cowboys Stadium.

"Any time you're putting on an event of this magnitude, you have your challenges," Goodell said Monday morning at a press conference, according to the Washington Post.

"We've had them this week. We had an issue yesterday with several seats for our fans. It's something that we have been taking very seriously, working at it. We apologize to those fans that were impacted by this."

The NFL said that the displaced fans will receive free tickets to Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis, and were also allowed to come down on the field after the game, where they received free merchandise, food and beverages.

Those fans were also compensated with an amount three times the ticket's face value.

About 1,200 temporary seats had to be scrapped before the game due to safety concerns. Seating was found for about 850 of the displaced fans, but the other 400 or so had to watch the game on television inside the stadium.

"We will certainly do a thorough review and get to the bottom of why it all occurred, but we take full responsibility for that as putting on this game. But the one thing we will never do is compromise safety, the safety of our fans, safety of our players, anybody involved with our event," Goodell said.

While the seating fiasco was a black eye for the NFL, the audience for the Packers' 31-25 win over the Steelers was expected to smash TV viewing records for the second straight year, the FOX network predicted.

According to the overnight data, some 47.9 percent of US households with televisions tuned into Super Bowl XLV, and 71 percent of televisions on at the time were watching the game. That is a three percent increase from the overnight ratings of last year's Super Bowl, FOX said.

Full national ratings figures will be released later Monday, and they are expected to eclipse last year's match up, making the Packers' 31-25 win over the Steelers the most-watched television show ever.

In percentage terms, only Super Bowl XXI in 1987 had as big a proportion of television households glued to the game.