NFL History | Alltel Stadium, Jacksonville — The Room Count Was Met by Ship

New England beat Philadelphia 24 to 21 at Alltel Stadium on 6 February 2005. Pro-Football-Reference's box score prints the quarters raw, and they are reproduced raw here with no halftime line: Philadelphia 0, 7, 7 and 7; New England 0, 7, 7 and 10. The same box score gives the attendance as 78,125 and names the ground Alltel Stadium. Frank Fitzpatrick, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer eleven days before the game, described it as an 80,000-seat facility. Those two numbers sit side by side in this entry and no ratio is drawn between them.

The game is not the unusual part of this occasion. The lodging is.

A Super Bowl host city is chosen against a specification, and one line of that specification is a room count. Fitzpatrick reported on 26 January 2005 that for a stadium of Alltel's size the league required a guarantee of 17,500 upscale hotel rooms. The Associated Press, reporting from Jacksonville on the day of the game itself, gave the same figure and described the rooms as four- or five-star. Two accounts, eleven days apart, on the same number.

Jacksonville's difficulty was not a shortage of beds. Peter Rummell, who chaired the host committee, told Fitzpatrick that the city had enough rooms but that they were Holiday Inns and Comfort Inns rather than the higher-end accommodation the league requires. That is his distinction, paraphrased here and not quoted, and it is the whole of the problem: the city was short of a grade rather than of a quantity. A grade shortfall has a solution a quantity shortfall does not. A room of the required class can be brought in, if it floats.

How many ships came is not settled, and this entry does not settle it. Fitzpatrick's 26 January account says the committee leased five vessels, from Norwegian Cruise Line and Carnival, for eleven million dollars, which he wrote was far more than it had budgeted; that they would dock at three locations, all within a mile and a half of the stadium; and that they would sail for their home ports on 7 February, the day after the game. The Associated Press on 6 February counted seven ships in port carrying roughly 3,700 four- or five-star rooms, and noted that two of the seven were private charters. Twenty years afterwards, Mike Field's account for Jacksonville Today says four ships and then names five: the Seven Seas Navigator, berthed in from the Adams Mark hotel; the Carnival Miracle, at the JAXPORT cruise terminal off Heckscher Drive that had opened in 2003; and three Holland America vessels, the Zuiderdam, the Zaandam and the Volendam, along JAXPORT's Talleyrand Marine Terminal. That page disagrees with itself, and both 2005 accounts disagree with it and with each other.

The room totals disagree in the same pattern and are printed here unreconciled: 3,500 in the Inquirer, more than 3,500 in Jacksonville Today, about 3,700 in the Associated Press.

The Associated Press distinction between vessels the committee leased and vessels chartered privately is the one thread that might reconcile a committee's five with a harbour's seven. None of the sources consulted draws that conclusion, and this entry does not draw it either.

What the week establishes is narrow, and worth stating without decoration. The condition a host city had to satisfy was written as an inventory number. An inventory number is not the same thing as a city, and Jacksonville met it by tying the difference up in the St. Johns River for a few days and sending it home the morning after the game. The rooms counted while they were moored and stopped counting when they sailed. Another entry in this series is pinned at a stadium a state tourism agency paid an annual fee to keep a single game in; this one is the same question asked from the other end, about what a city must supply rather than what it must pay.

Status note, September 2026. This entry describes the requirement and the arrangements as its sources record them in 2005 and 2025. Nothing here establishes what the league asks of a host city today, what the building is called now, or what is moored in the river. Every figure above is the one printed by the source named beside it.

Coordinate. 30.322400 N, 81.637034 W, precision plus or minus 400 m. This is a single-method pin and the method is disclosed, because no second positional record was reachable. The Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns nothing at all for the stadium's own published address in three of its names — 1 Stadium Place, 1 EverBank Stadium Dr, and the one-line form with the zip code — while a control query on 128 E Forsyth St in downtown Jacksonville matched instantly, so the geocoder was healthy and the federal address file simply does not carry the stadium's drive. It also produced a wrong-street match worth recording: asked for 1 Philip Randolph Blvd in 32202, the boulevard along the complex's western edge, it returned a confident match for 1 A PHILIP RANDOLPH ACADEMY AC in 32209, roughly six kilometres away, a longer and differently-typed street name that had absorbed the one requested. Four addresses did match: 1400 Gator Bowl Blvd at 30.322400 / -81.642649; 300 A Philip Randolph Blvd, the arena on the complex's west side, at 30.325507 / -81.643862; 1000 A Philip Randolph Blvd at 30.334371 / -81.642642; and 1400 Haines St at 30.340284 / -81.637034. The two readings on A. Philip Randolph Boulevard, a kilometre apart and at slightly different longitudes, show that these are interpolated road points rather than building points. The point above crosses the latitude of the boulevard bounding the complex on the south with the longitude of the street running north and south on its east. That is one method used at several addresses, not two methods, and the eastern reading was taken about two kilometres north of the subject, which is the known weakness of street triangulation on long streets and is why the radius is 400 m rather than smaller. The radius is sized from the stadium bowl and its apron, not from the decimal places of any reading. The Historical Marker Database returns no entries for the Gator Bowl or for Duval County under the terms tried; the Socrata catalogue endpoint for data.coj.net returns 404 to this task; and the OpenStreetMap and Wikidata routes are closed to it.

Cover image: local military personnel and first responders folding a football-field-sized American flag on the field before a Jacksonville Jaguars game, 13 September 2015. U.S. Air Force photograph by Tech. Sgt. Troy Anderson, 125th Fighter Wing, public domain, via DVIDS. This is not Super Bowl XXXIX. It is the same bowl a decade later, under the building's later name, and it is here because the aerial angle shows both the stadium and the St. Johns River behind it in one frame, which is the geography this entry is about. The file's Location field reads only Jacksonville, Florida; it is the caption that places the camera above the stadium.

Second image: two U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon aircraft of Patrol Squadron 30 flying over before a Jacksonville Jaguars game against the Indianapolis Colts, 13 December 2015. U.S. Navy photograph by Timothy Schumaker, Navy Public Affairs Support Element East, public domain, via DVIDS. Also not the Super Bowl; it is included because it shows the filled bowl from inside. The DVIDS record gives the photographer's rank two ways, as Petty Officer 3rd Class in the credit line and as PO1 in the copyright statement, and the VIRIN carries no rank to break the tie, so no rank is stated here.