National Football League

Seating issues leave 400 fans displaced

Published Feb. 6, 2011 12:00 a.m. ET

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The problem-plagued Super Bowl suffered another setback just hours before kickoff Sunday, when 1,250 fans found out they could not use their promised seats.

The NFL cited safety fears stemming from the "incomplete installation" of temporary seats inside Cowboys Stadium.

Most ticket holders were given other vacant seats inside Jerry Jones' showplace stadium, the league said in a statement. But about 400 fans were eventually sent to standing-room areas or told they could watch the game on television at a club inside the $1.2 billion stadium.

The affected fans were promised a $2,700 refund – three times the face value of their tickets but far less than many spent to attend the big game.

"For all the money we spent, we could have gone to Europe," said one disappointed fan, Roger O'Toole, a truck driver from Pittsburgh. "It's devastating."

He and his friend Dave Witt, a database administrator, braved travel delays and bad weather to get to Texas and spent $800 a ticket to watch the Super Bowl in person for the first time.

They waited in line for two hours to enter the stadium, only to be told they had no seats but could watch the game on television at the "Miller Lite Club" inside the facility.

They said they were not offered refunds.

The ticket mess came after a week of ice and snow storms that made roads and highways impassable, and forced the cancellation of many flights into north Texas.

On Friday, snow and ice falling from the stadium roof sent six people to the hospital.

The combination of problems may have dented the Cowboys' hopes of hosting another Super Bowl in 2016.

The league pledged to conduct "a full review" of the seating fiasco and said it regretted "the situation and inconvenience that it may have caused."

The Green Bay Packers claimed their fourth Super Bowl title with a 31-25 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers.

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