Minneapolis beat out fellow finalists New Orleans and Indianapolis. The potential host cities each made their pitch to league ownership prior to the meetings and gave their final case on Tuesday.
Pro Football Talk's Michael David Smith noted the final vote came between Minneapolis and New Orleans—a battle of David and Goliath in Super Bowl folklore.
New Orleans has hosted 10 prior Super Bowls, most recently in 2013. The Big Easy is tied with Miami for the most hosting duties in history and has been known to be a reliable venue. With warm weather, a domed stadium and a population used to large influxes of tourism, New Orleans has plenty going in its favor.
Minneapolis, though, had a trump card: a brand new, state-of-the-art stadium. The Vikings' new stadium, tentatively titled Vikings Stadium, broke ground in December 2013. It is expected to be completed for the 2016 season, coinciding with NFL rules that require a year between a stadium's opening and it hosting a Super Bowl.
A domed stadium with numerous amenities designed to make it the most modern stadium in the NFL, taxpayers and the Vikings have set a budget of roughly $1 billion.
New Orleans' Mercedes-Benz Superdome opened in 1975 and is one of the NFL's oldest stadiums. It is also the home of one of the biggest Super Bowl fiascoes in history, when a power surge caused a blackout and delayed Super Bowl XLVII after halftime.
It's difficult to tell how much the blackout played a factor, but it's impossible to ignore the discrepancy in stadium age. Three of the last four Super Bowls have been played in stadiums that opened within five years of their hosting season.
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