“This is Steve Tasker, sideline reporter for the Super Bowl 47. If you’re expecting to hear our friend Jim Nantz, it may be a moment before he gets on.”
When the audio of Super Bowl XLVII between the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens suddenly cut out early in the third quarter on Feb. 3, 2013, the millions watching the CBS broadcast might have suspected something was amiss.
When Tasker, assigned to work the 49ers sideline, was the first voice anyone heard, it was confirmed. There was no power in the broadcast booth, elevators and escalators ground to a halt and so did the game — for 34 minutes.
“Half the power in New Orleans stadium, the Superdome here, is out,” Tasker announced to the world.
For some Ravens players, the stoppage was suspicious. Jacoby Jones had returned the second-half kickoff 108 yards for a touchdown, Baltimore was leading 28-6 and the Ravens had just sacked 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick on second down. The Super Bowl was about to be a rout and then the lights went out? Linebacker Ray Lewis smelled a rat.
“You cannot tell me someone wasn’t sitting there, and when they say, ‘The Ravens (are) about to blow them out. Man, we better do something,’” he said in an interview for NFL Films’ “America’s Game” later that year. “That’s a huge shift in any game, in all seriousness.”
The actual explanation was more mundane. A newly installed device called a relay automatically cut power to the stadium when the amperage hit a certain level because the factory settings were too low.
Entergy, the local electric company, vows that won’t happen Sunday when the Super Bowl returns to New Orleans for the first time in 12 years. The company no longer uses the equipment responsible for the blackout, there are better redundancies for electrical flow and the stadium has hosted more than a decade of New Orleans Saints games and concerts since without incident.
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Those concerts, significantly, have included Beyonce, whose halftime show in 2013 preceded the blackout, and Taylor Swift, who brought 200,000 fans to the Caesars Superdome over three nights in October.
“Some called that weekend the ultimate tabletop exercise,” Entergy said in a statement.
While the 49ers laugh at Lewis’ conspiracy theory — “We had the same delay they did,” offensive tackle Joe Staley said — there’s no question they benefited from the reset.
They barrelled into their locker room at halftime intent on fixing everything that had gone wrong in the first half, quickly going over the tactical changes they’d make. Then they had nowhere to go.
A Super Bowl halftime is twice as long as a regular-season version and because there was so much staging equipment, the players couldn’t get onto the field. Instead, they were cooped up in the locker room.
The 49ers note that the Ravens got away with a holding penalty against fullback Bruce Miller on Jones’ kick-return touchdown to start the third quarter. But there also was a sense that the long halftime had an effect.
“I remember coach (Jim) Harbaugh coming up and asking, ‘Were we warmed up?’” the 49ers strength coach at the time, Mark Uyeyama, recalled. “And I go, ‘Uhhh — clearly (Jones) was.’”
The 49ers then ran two plays — a 29-yard pass to Michael Crabtree and a 3-yard run by Frank Gore — before Kaepernick was sacked by Arthur Jones. Following that play, color commentator Phil Simms was in mid-sentence when the broadcast went silent at 7:37 p.m. local time.
The 49ers had the ball trailing 28-6 when the power suddenly went out in the Superdome. (Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)
An attack? A shooter? Those thoughts flashed through everyone’s mind. The Sandy Hook shooting had happened a month and a half earlier and the 49ers had been on hand at a game in New England where the victims were remembered.
“The first thing that went through my head is an act of terrorism,” then-49ers offensive coordinator Greg Roman said. “And what’s coming next? First, they cut the power. And now what? My whole family’s there.”
“I honestly thought it was a terrorist attack initially,” said Wink Martindale, then the Ravens’ inside linebackers coach. “You just didn’t know. Right away, you’re looking up where you know your family is sitting and everything else to make sure everyone was OK.”
After a few moments, those thoughts dissipated. There was an initial groan from the crowd, but there was no panic or commotion. The Superdome was quiet.
“To their credit, everyone remained calm,” Tasker said in a phone interview.
“Why is the clock stopped?”
Throwback to the lights going out during Ravens vs. 49ers in Super Bowl XLVII 💡😳 pic.twitter.com/BD5qbuhjmq
— NFL Films (@NFLFilms) December 25, 2023
He said everyone’s first task was to find out what happened and how long the game would be delayed. The sideline reporters had stopped using wireless microphones six years earlier during rainy Super Bowl XLI because those mics had gone out. Tasker had a cable attached to his mic in New Orleans that stretched only as far as the numbers on the field. The league officials he wanted to interview were safely huddled at midfield and didn’t want to be interviewed on camera. So he strolled to midfield, got as much information as he could, then was approached by Jim Harbaugh on his way back to the sideline.
“He wanted to know what they told me,” Tasker said.
The 49ers had an advantage in that they’d gone through something similar the year before when a transformer blew outside of Candlestick Park, causing two delays during a “Monday Night Football” game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Uyeyama said he reminded players how well they’d handled that wait on the sideline.
“We were better prepared than we were against Pittsburgh,” Uyeyama said. “And we’d put (Ben) Roethlisberger on his back all game. So we were walking around and communicating with the guys, ‘Remember, Pittsburgh.’”
The teams initially were told the game would resume in about 15 minutes and that everyone should remain on the field. They heard the same refrain — 15 minutes — when they checked in later.
“The longer it went, you had to get yourself back in coaching mode,” Martindale said. “It was like, ‘Holy s—, we have to start stretching.’ We knew we were in trouble. I know analytics say there’s no such thing as momentum, but that’s bulls—. The lights going out changed the momentum of the game. We were killing them when the lights went out. We had an older team than them and it really took us a while to get loose again and get going.”
Said 49ers safety Donte Whitner: “Football is a game based on momentum. And whenever you have a lull like that, it’s a good opportunity for the team that’s not playing well to regroup and recover.”
He said linebackers Patrick Willis and NaVorro Bowman discussed strategy. Justin Smith, the elder statesman of the defense, made sure everyone stayed focused and calm.
“I remember vividly hearing Dashon Goldson continue to say, ‘Not today. Not today. We’re too good. We’re too great of a defense,’” Whitner recalled. “And what he was referring to was, ‘Let’s not make the simple mistakes that will beat us.’”
The blackout officially last 34 minutes and seemed to lead to a huge momentum swing for the 49ers. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
On offense, Roman made only a quick visit to the locker room at halftime. The 49ers had scored only two field goals at that point and he needed to rework the entire game plan. Roman spoke briefly to the players, then approached Harbaugh.
“I just said, ‘Hey, Jim, I’ve gotta get upstairs and get things figured out,’” Roman said.
He was back in the coach’s booth before Beyonce began her show and felt good about the alterations he’d made.
“Then they returned the kickoff and it was like the price of poker has changed even greater,” Roman said. “It was like, ‘Oh my God. Now we’re in quite a hole.’”
He made even more adjustments after the stadium lost power. The radio headsets connecting him and defensive coordinator Vic Fangio to the sideline didn’t work and in fact were one of the last things to come online before the game resumed.
So Roman bounced plays and ideas off of receivers coach John Morton. The 49ers would run the ball occasionally to keep Lewis and the Ravens defense honest. Otherwise, they’d attack through the air.
“We were gonna be ultra-aggressive,” Roman said. “We had so much talent on the team, it was only a matter of time.”
He was right. The 49ers punted immediately after play resumed but scored on a 31-yard Kaepernick-to-Crabtree pass when they got the ball back. Then they scored on their next three possessions, cutting Baltimore’s lead to 31-29 with just under 10 minutes to play. It was as if the blackout had created two distinct games.
“It was like a track meet from that point forward,” Roman said.
But while the Ravens scored once more — on a Justin Tucker 38-yard field goal — the 49ers offense got bogged down deep in the red zone in the final minutes.
San Francisco seemed to have a great shot for a go-ahead touchdown after Gore’s 33-yard run to the 7-yard line with 2:39 to go. That carry, however, left Gore — one of the best short-yardage runners in the NFL — winded and his replacement, LaMichael James, was stopped for a 2-yard gain on first down.
A quarterback keeper that likely would have scored a touchdown was wiped out when Jim Harbaugh called a timeout to avoid a play-clock violation. When the last of three throws to Crabtree in the corner of the end zone sailed over the receiver’s head, the Ravens knew they had finally halted San Francisco’s momentum and hung on for the win.
“If we would have lost that game, I would have walked away saying, ‘It was because the power went out and the long delay,’” Martindale said. “We were just killing them otherwise.”
Said Roman: “Unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough. That was a bizarre day in our lives, for sure.”
Despite being the lone face and the voice for the Super Bowl broadcast for a few uncertain minutes, Tasker said he didn’t receive much attention following the game. Instead, his phone started blowing up six days later when “Saturday Night Live” — with Taran Killam playing Tasker — spoofed the blackout with a cold open.
“That’s when I knew I’d finally made it,” Tasker said with a laugh.
(Top photo: Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)
Source: nytimes.com
