New Year at the New Meadowlands

While Sunday was a rough day for my Giants, who were bounced from the playoffs by Green Bay's victory over Chicago despite winning at Washington and finishing the season at a respectible 10-6, the "other" New York football team had a big day at home and I was there to witness it in person.  Heading to the playoffs for the second consecutive season, the New York Jets dismantled the Buffalo Bills at New Meadowlands Stadium on Sunday, and thanks to a Stanford connection I scored two free tickets to the game, a club parking pass, plus access to the Jets' exclusive Tiffany's Green Room.

Before the game, I wasn't super-excited about driving all the way to New Jersey for an essentially-meaningless Jets-Bills game (the J-E-T-S had clinched a playoff spot the week before and were sure to rest the majority of their offensive starters, including QB Mark Sanchez and RB Ladanian Tomlinson).  It was the day after New Years and I figured I'd be more comfortable and just as happy watching the game from the comfort of my parents' living room on Long Island.  Little did I know that watching a football game from the Tiffany's Green Room on a 50-degree day in January could combine the excitement of live NFL football with the ammenities of one's own home.

At first blush, a Jets game at the New Meadowlands was 10% football game, 90% carnival.  I'm not sure if all Jets games are like this (or just inconsequential Week 17 games versus a Buffalo team starting Brian Brohm at quarterback), but the amount of pregame activity going on outside the stadium was staggering.  There was a dixieland band, jugglers, football-themed carnival-style games (throwing a football through a cardboard player cutout with a hole in it, for example) and a host of free giveaways ("Sign your life away to Verizon and get a free hand towel!").  I was already experiencing sensory-overload when I got off the elevator at the Tiffany's Green Room, where the ambiance couldn't have been more different from the zoo surrounding the stadium.

The Green Room is part bar / lounge, part living room, and part restaurant.  The area was filled with free food - good stuff, too, not your typical stadium fare - and the open bar was completely free as well.  The walls were lined with couches and booths from which you could eat, drink, relax and watch the game from dozens of different HD screens.  Other people were saddled up to the bar, talking football (or perhaps stocks?) and drinking cocktails.  While I'm normally a "man of the people" when it comes to professional sporting events - I like to sit in the real seats with the real fans - this was the perfect place to be for this particular sleepy Jets contest.  It was great - when you wanted to be at a live NFL game you walked a few feet outside to your seats for an awesome, up-close view, and when you wanted the comforts of home you came back inside to the Green Room and grabbed a drink and a seat.  I wish I took some pictures inside the club area, but I was an invited guest of a Jets employee and didn't want to make an abnormally-large ass of myself.

View from our seats just outside the Tiffany's Green Room.

We did venture outside of the comfy confines of the Green Room to check out the rest of the place, of course, and overall I was impressed.  While the stadium is fairly utilitarian and doesn't have a ton of character, there's a reason for that; the builders did a great job of constructing a stadium that can be completely Jets one afternoon, and completely Giants the next.  Every sign can be flipped from green to blue automatically, so every player poster and team flag is rotated before each weekend, depending on whether the Jets or Giants are home.  Even the permanent signage (denoting section numbers and the like) are surrounded by soft lighting than can be flipped from green to blue, a nice touch.

As you might remember from my recap of opening day at Citi Field in April, I don't like when stadiums (especially new ones) clutter themselves with a million visual advertisements.  In this regard, New Meadowlands Stadium is awesome. There are basically only four large permanent ads visible from the inside, one above each of the giant video boards in the corners of the stadium.  Not only are these ads relatively classy and extremely unintrusive, they're helpful to fans; each corner of the stadium, inside and out, is completely branded by those four sponsors.  So, fans looking to meet up at the game can tell each ther that they're "right outside the Bud Light gate" or "sitting under the MetLife video board," which is helpful in an 80,000+ person stadium.  The concourses in the corners behind the video boards are branded, too, and are complete with interactive displays that are part-advertisement, part-entertainment.  I took a picture of the Verizon concourse (my favorite), which featured a series of TVs showing live NFL and other sports action, as well as a scrolling ticker with scores and news from around the sports world.

MetLife, Verizon, Pepsi and Bud Light (shown here) are the four big New Meadowlands sponsors.

The Verizon Studio can be found in the concourse between the Verizon entry gate and video board.

I can't wait to get back to the New Meadowlands for a Giants game next season and experience the place like a "true" football fan.  For this particular post-New Years afternoon, however, hanging out in the Green Room was the perfect way to watch "Brohm!  Brunell! It's the Bills and the Jets at the New Meadowlands Stadium!"