The Jackson on the Nightstand

Spend a billion, get a bone:

Four ballots into a tension-filled process, the Minneapolis Super Bowl pitch built around the new Vikings stadium triumphed Tuesday over party magnet New Orleans and 2012 host Indianapolis to bring the NFL’s premier event to Minnesota in 2018.

U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis, former Carlson Cos. board chair Marilyn Carlson Nelson and other members of the Minnesota delegation danced, jumped up and down, hugged and high-fived on hearing the news. Their raucous cheers and exclamations of “We did it!” reverberated through the hallways of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the upscale Buckhead neighborhood, where the high-stakes drama had just played out.

“The way they jumped for joy was the way I felt inside,” Vikings owner Zygi Wilf said later at a news conference.

People want to be happy about all this, and that's fine. We'll revisit it eventually. I just want to make two brief observations:

• The economic impact is overstated. If having the Super Bowl in your town was a way to drive greater lasting economic success, New Orleans, which has hosted the event ten times, would be the richest city on the planet.
• One of the more ridiculous assertions that I've seen made is that the economic benefit to Bloomington and St. Paul will be huge, because visitors to town will be able to get to the venue easily using the light rail line. This is ridiculous, of course -- people who go to Super Bowls don't typically rely on public transportation, no matter how spiffy and cool it is. And unless we see dramatic improvement in trip times, no one is going to want to use the Green Line.

But that's okay -- haters are gonna hate and all that. Enjoy your moment, kids.