MetLife Stadium: Two Teams, One House, One Historic Super Bowl
New Jersey
The massive stadium rising from the New Jersey Meadowlands is one of only two in the National Football League that serves as the home field for two separate franchises. MetLife Stadium is where both the New York Giants and the New York Jets play, a shared arrangement that is almost unheard of in professional sports and has produced a rivalry within a rivalry that fans of both teams feel keenly every time they walk through the same gates.
Construction began in September two thousand seven after the Jets, whose Manhattan stadium proposal had collapsed, joined forces with the Giants to build a replacement for the aging Giants Stadium next door. MetLife opened on April tenth, two thousand ten, on a site adjacent to its predecessor. The two teams, who could not agree on a name, called it New Meadowlands Stadium until MetLife Insurance purchased the naming rights in two thousand eleven for a reported four hundred million dollars over twenty-five years.
The stadium seats roughly eighty-two thousand five hundred fans and is designed without a roof or any fixed heating system, a fact that became historically significant on February second, two thousand fourteen. That afternoon, MetLife hosted Super Bowl Forty-Eight, the first Super Bowl ever played outdoors in a cold-weather climate. League officials had worried publicly about snow, ice, or hypothermia. What happened instead was a game played in cold but calm conditions, with the Seattle Seahawks dismantling the Denver Broncos forty-three to eight in what became one of the most lopsided Super Bowl results in history.
The Giants have won four Super Bowl championships, in nineteen eighty-seven, nineteen ninety-one, two thousand eight, and two thousand twelve, the last two in particular remembered for stunning upsets of the previously undefeated New England Patriots. The Jets' lone Super Bowl title came in January nineteen sixty-nine, when Joe Namath famously guaranteed a victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts and delivered.
