NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell & NFL Executive VP Eric Grubman - Ingles

Super Bowl XLV – Monday, February 7, 2011

NFL COMMISSIONER ROGER GOODELL & NFL EXECUTIVE VP ERIC GRUBMAN

(opening remarks from Roger Goodell during the MVP press conference) “Good morning. Congratulations to Coach (Mike) McCarthy. Fantastic football game. I want to congratulate not only coach, but (President) Mark Murphy, (General Manager) Ted Thompson, the great players in the entire (Green Bay Packers) organization the great Packer fans. We have preliminary readings that have come in already that indicate that the game will be the most-watched show in the history of television, so we’re excited about the fan reaction from last night and the incredible game they were able to see. Any time you put on an event of this magnitude, you have your challenges. We’ve had them this week. We had an issue this week with several seats for our fans. It’s something that we have been taking very seriously, working at it. We apologize to those fans that were impacted. We are going to work with them and we are going to do better in the future. We will certainly do a thorough review and get to the bottom of why it all occurred, but we take full responsibility for that as putting on this game. But the one thing we will never do is compromise safety – safety for our fans, safety for our players, anyone involved with our event. I want to thank in context of that, the Arlington Fire Department and the Arlington Police Department. They, and other officials in this area have done an outstanding job and we are grateful to them for their hard work and helping us as we addressed many of the challenges this week. I’d also like to take a minute and thank our staff, who worked tirelessly this week and right through the game and right through the night last night – they did an extraordinary job. Several of our employees volunteered to give up their seats so we could accommodate those fans. I’m proud of what they’ve done and I thank them for all of that. And we’re going to take your questions after Aaron (Rodgers) gets done. (President of NFL Ventures, inc.) Eric Grubman and I will meet you over here on the side and will be happy to answer your questions on that. Let me just make one more thank you, which is to the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee: Roger Staubach, Bill Lively, Troy Aikman, all the people that worked so hard on this event. They did an absolutely terrific job and we’re grateful for their hard work and the success that they had. But this morning is about the Super Bowl. It’s about football and it’s about the great players and the great team that won the Super Bowl last night. We have a Super Bowl MVP that represents the best in the game, the best of the people who play the game. He’s not only an extraordinary quarterback who had a great performance last night, more importantly, he’s a great young man. He really does things right and he’s a terrific person to have involved in the NFL. We’re so proud that he is the Super Bowl MVP, and so I’d like to have Aaron Rodgers come up and accept the Pete Rozelle MVP Trophy for a great performance last night. (on why the seats in Cowboys Stadium were not set up in time for the Super Bowl) Goodell: “We are going to do a thorough review of that. We don’t have all of the answers to that, but it was obviously a failure on our part, and we have to take responsibility for that.”

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