50 Most Memorable Super Bowl Moments, No. 22: Blackout at the Superdome
As the NFL approaches its highly anticipated golden anniversary Super Bowl, Yahoo Sports takes a look back at some of the most memorable moments in the game’s history.
In our rankings, the moments go beyond the great scores and plays. We also take a look at entertainment performances, scandals/controversies and other events associated with corresponding Super Bowls.
Here’s a look at moment No. 22:
Lights out!
The air inside the Mercedes-Benz Superdome was still a bit smoky from Beyonce’s halftime performance. Jacoby Jones had just drained much of the hope out of San Francisco 49ers fans with his 108-yard return touchdown of the second-half kickoff that gave the Baltimore Ravens a 28-6 lead in Super Bowl XLVII.
And then, in a heartbeat, it was dark. Not pitch black, but significantly darker than it had been, after the videoboards and most of the bulbs in the ring of lights high in the dome went out.
At 7:37 p.m. local time, with 13:22 left in the third quarter, the biggest spectacle in American sports was put on pause. And it stayed paused for more than half an hour.
As the capacity crowd buzzed and the hundreds of reporters in the building searched online for any indication of what had happened, the players did the only thing they could do: congregate either on the field or near their respective benches.
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““It was the strangest thing I’ve ever been part of,” Ravens safety Bernard Pollard said. “We didn’t know [what was happening]. We were told 20 minutes, five minutes. It was the first time I’ve ever stretched in the dark with my teammates.”
“It was just crazy. We were just sitting down like, ‘Wow, this is a [newer] stadium and the power goes out here too after it happened at Candlestick [Park],” said 49ers linebacker Patrick Willis, recalling the December 2011 home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers when a blown transformer caused two delays.
Once the lights came back on in New Orleans, it was as if a light bulb had gone on among the 49ers players and coaches, and they realized they were playing in the Super Bowl. They scored 17 points in the third quarter, cutting the Ravens’ lead to just five. The Niners closed to within 2 at one point in the fourth quarter, but were denied a go-ahead touchdown in the closing seconds.
Nearly two months after the game, an explanation was provided of what went wrong for those 34 minutes; a forensic engineer hired to investigate the outage determined it was caused by an electrical relay device installed specifically to prevent a power failure. The engineer’s report said the primary cause of the disruption was a malfunction or “misoperation” of the relay.
But at least one person didn’t believe those findings: Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis. Lewis, who retired after his team’s win, said in the “America’s Game” documentary chronicling Baltimore’s Lombardi-lifting season that he believes the blackout was intentional.
“I’m not gonna accuse nobody of nothing – because I don’t know facts. But you’re a zillion-dollar company, and your lights go out? No,” Lewis said, laughing. “No way.
“Now listen, if you grew up like I grew up – and you grew up in a household like I grew up – then sometimes your lights might go out, because times get hard. I understand that. But you cannot tell me somebody wasn’t sitting there and when they say, ‘The Ravens [are] about to blow them out. Man, we better do something.’ … That’s a huge shift in any game, in all seriousness. And as you see how huge it was because it let them right back in the game.”
Teammate Terrell Suggs agreed with Lewis. In an interview with ESPN, Suggs mentioned “Vegas, parlor tricks.”
“I was like, ah, Roger Goodell, he never stops, he always has something up his sleeve,” Suggs said. “He just couldn’t let us have this one in a landslide, huh? I thought he had a hand in it. Most definitely, he had a hand in it.”
Neither Lewis nor Suggs ever explained why the outage affected the Ravens negatively and the Niners positively. To the victors go the conspiracy theories, apparently.
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