Super Bowl 50’s longest drive: Highway 101 to ‘San Francisco’s’ far-flung stadium

Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning answers a question what used to be Media Day for Super Bowl 50. The kickoff event for Super Bowl week was held at night this year. 

SAN FRANCISCO — The place line on this column might lead you to believe that Super Bowl 50 is being played here.
So might the fact that the San Francisco 49ers are the nominal host franchise, not to mention the Super Bowl City fan village being here, as well as the DirecTV and Pepsi Super Bowl concert series, the Super Bowl media center and … well, the Super Bowl media.
If this is what you were led to believe, consider yourself misled.
The game is not being played in the City By The Bay. You may leave your heart in San Francisco, but you will leave the contents of your wallet in in Santa Clara, home of Levi’s Stadium, an hour south in good traffic. And traffic is never good.
Santa Clara is a city, and it’s sort of by the Bay.
So, close enough.
“I’m calling it the Bosnia-Herzegovina Super Bowl,” says Ray Ratto, the ever-irreverent former San Francisco Examiner and then S.F. Chronicle columnist who’s now with Comcast Sports. “We’re Bosnia; they’re Herzegovina.”
It’s like … holding the Grey Cup in Hamilton and advertising it as Toronto, and everyone staying in Hogtown and commuting.
Not that this is a foreign concept.

Heck, the New York Giants and New York Jets not only don’t play home games in New York City, they don’t even play in New York State.
No one ever advertised “the East Rutherford Super Bowl” or willingly stayed in New Jersey when they played it.
Ratto covered last year’s Grey Cup in Winnipeg from a Bay Area resident’s point of view, contrasting and comparing with what hosting Super Bowl would be like.
He was predisposed to declare Winnipeg the winner, and what everyone hereabouts anticipates to be a traffic mare’s nest until Super Bowl 50 is safely gone — perhaps never to return — merely reinforces his opinion.
Ratto doesn’t figure there’ll ever be another Bay Area Super Bowl. Anything that comes West after this will be staged in L.A. at Stan Kroenke’s new zillion-dollar pleasure palace in semi-scenic Inglewood, yet to be built on the site of the old Hollywood Park.
The 49ers got this one as a reward for doing all the heavy lifting in getting a stadium built in a state where the next-newest NFL park had been constructed in 1967.
Give the organizing committee credit: in putting together the successful bid for the 50th anniversary of the National Football League’s annual greatest spectacle in in the history of spectacles, they not only got Levi’s Stadium up, they sold the idea of an entire Bay Area show, which they expanded to include slightly far-flung “area” attractions as Pebble Beach and California wine country and Oakland. OK, maybe not Oakland.
This fits in with the happy motoring theme.


Not to bore you with how the sausage is made, but even Media Day, in which a few hundred writers and several thousand novelty acts annually descend on the football teams on the Tuesday of Super Bowl week and cherry-pick sound-bytes from their musings — was no longer Media Day. Or even Tuesday.
And it wasn’t in San Francisco, either. It was Monday night in San Jose, at the SAP Center, home of the NHL Sharks, with thousands of fans in the seats, watching people get interviewed.

    No matter what they called it, or when it was scheduled, the Event Formerly Known As Media Day still featured more sideshows than football talk. Here, Miss Universe, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, poses with Broncos cornerback Kayvon Webster.

If you were there, hopefully you budgeted some drive time. With a full-on police escort from San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center to the SAP Center, at 2:30 p.m., which absolutely delighted the commuters on Route 101 as they were nudged aside for the media to roll by in the fast lane, it was precisely an hour’s bus ride.
The drive to Levi’s Stadium is marginally shorter, but less pleasant at the end. It’s not a wildly popular place with the locals.
Even the Oakland Raiders don’t want to move there, and they’d move anywhere.
So if you happen to have a police escort Sunday, you’re good.
If not, don’t be like those four or five drivers who dilly-dallied getting out of the motorcade’s way Monday.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has the power to impose capital punishment, regardless of state law, on those who fail to enjoy Super Bowl.
It’s right there in the statutes, behind the chapter on the Ideal Gas Law.