NFL History | Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia — A Snow Emergency Is Not a Playing Condition

Shortly after noon on Sunday 26 December 2010, the National Football League postponed that night's game at Lincoln Financial Field between the Minnesota Vikings and the Philadelphia Eagles. An Associated Press report carried by MPR News the same afternoon, filed at 6:09 p.m. with contributions from Dan Gelston and Ron Todt, places the decision with the league office and gives its grounds through the league's spokesman Greg Aiello: public safety, in light of the snow emergency then declared in Philadelphia. The same report has Aiello adding that the league wanted enough time to see roads, parking lots and the stadium fully cleared.

Read that list in the order it was given. Roads. Parking lots. The stadium. Two of the three lie outside the fence, and the building itself is named last.

The game had already been moved once. The AP report notes it had been scheduled for one o'clock on the Sunday afternoon and had been shifted into the evening under the league's flexible-scheduling arrangement before the storm entered the question at all.

WHAT THE STORM ACTUALLY DID

The forecast the league acted on, as the AP describes it, was for more than a foot of snow in Philadelphia. The National Weather Service office at Philadelphia and Mount Holly, in its winter storm summary for 26 and 27 December 2010, records the storm's official blizzard conditions in named New Jersey counties — Morris, Somerset, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic, Cape May and southeastern Burlington — and not in Philadelphia. It puts the heaviest bands in the evening of the 26th, with rates of two to three inches an hour across eastern New Jersey and peak intensity around eight o'clock, which is the part of the evening the game had been moved into. Its highest measurements are elsewhere: 30 inches at Brick Township, New Jersey, and an all-time record 20.1 inches at the Atlantic City airport at Pomona.

The same office's snowfall table for the same storm prints 12.4 inches at Philadelphia, measured at 8:02 a.m. on the 27th, with 12.0 inches at Roxborough and 9.0 at Somerton. Neither the summary nor the table prints a storm total for Philadelphia International Airport.

The forecast figure and the measured figure are set down here side by side and no conclusion is drawn from the pair. What can be said without arithmetic is narrower and more useful: the argument that followed was never about how much snow there would be.

THE ARGUMENT

The Eagles head coach Andy Reid is reported by the AP to have supported the league's decision on safety grounds. Pennsylvania's governor, Edward Rendell, did not, and did not let it go. A CBS 3 report by Ben Simmoneau dated 28 December describes him making the case on the city's sports radio across something like a day and a half and then repeating it to the station: that the move was a symptom of national softness, and that treating spectators as people who cannot be trusted to reach a stadium in the snow is a nanny-state arrangement.

His exact words are not reproduced here, and neither is anyone else's. Every source reached for this entry arrived through a summarising fetch, and a summariser's rendering of a sentence is not a page carrying that sentence. This entry therefore contains no quotation marks at all, and every attributed statement in it is a paraphrase.

Nor does it say who was right. Whether the postponement was correct is a judgement, and it is not in any of the records consulted.

WHO DECIDES

Three parties had a view and one of them had the decision.

The club did not have it. The city did not have it either, and the instrument people reached for when describing the city's role was not a football instrument: a snow emergency is a municipal declaration about a municipality's own streets and about parking on them, issued in the same terms whether or not anyone is playing a game that night. The Commonwealth's governor had no power over the schedule whatever, and used the one instrument available to him, which was a microphone.

The league office decided, and the grounds it gave were about the streets.

Notice what no one was arguing about. The league did not say the playing surface was unusable. The governor did not say it was usable. In a series that contains a championship dug out of Shibe Park by hand and a title game at Franklin Field that had to start at noon, this is the entry in which the field is never the question — and it is the one where the game moved anyway.

THE GAME

It was played on Tuesday 28 December 2010. The Pro-Football-Reference box score gives the venue as Lincoln Financial Field, a start time of 8:06 p.m., and attendance of 69,144; the AP report filed two days earlier gives the rescheduled kickoff as 8 p.m. Eastern. Both figures are printed here and neither is preferred. Minnesota won by 24 points to 14. Joe Webb started at quarterback for Minnesota and Michael Vick for Philadelphia.

No quarter-by-quarter line is printed. The box score as retrieved returned four quarter figures for Philadelphia that do not sum to the final score returned in the same response, and a line score that disagrees with itself is not a line score worth reprinting.

STATUS NOTE

This entry was written in September 2026 and describes the decision, the storm and the game as its sources record them: the Associated Press report of 26 December 2010, the CBS 3 report of 28 December 2010, two National Weather Service documents covering the storm of 26 and 27 December 2010, and a Pro-Football-Reference box score. Nothing in it establishes what the stadium is called today, who holds its naming rights now, what the league's current practice on postponement is, or whether the flexible-scheduling arrangement described here still stands in that form.

COORDINATE

The pin is the field GPS reading recorded for marker 289287 in the Historical Marker Database, 39 degrees 54.141 minutes north and 75 degrees 10.089 minutes west, which is 39.902350 and -75.168158. That marker's own location description places it at Pattison Avenue and South 11th Street, on the right when travelling east on Pattison, at 1020 Pattison Avenue, with the Philadelphia Eagles Military Memorial a few steps away and a Veterans Stadium Liberty Bell about a fifth of a mile off.

The United States Census Bureau geocoder matches 1020 Pattison Avenue in the federal address file at 39.904449 and -75.166689, roughly 265 metres north-north-east. That is the mailing-address-against-footprint offset this series has met at every large venue, and here it puts the federal point on the Pattison Avenue centreline rather than on the plaza inside the block. The two records are not reconciled.

Three routes failed and are named so that they are not retried blind. The venue's own postal style, 1 Lincoln Financial Field Way, returned an empty match from the same geocoder; a control on 1101 Pattison Avenue matched at 39.904667 and -75.167455 and showed the address file healthy in that postal code. A probe on 1101 Packer Avenue matched into a different postal code, 19145, and returned a latitude north of Pattison Avenue, which is impossible for a street running south of it, and was discarded. Philadelphia's parcel interface at phl.carto.com answered a bare schema probe and then returned HTTP 400 for every query carrying a select list, a filter or an ordering, so no municipal parcel point was obtained.

Precision is stated as plus or minus 300 metres, sized from the stadium's footprint and from the 265-metre disagreement above, not from the decimal places in either reading.

COVER

United States Air National Guard photograph by Sgt. Michael Schwenk, New Jersey National Guard, VIRIN 241215-Z-IB607-1002, public domain, by way of DVIDS. It shows the New Jersey Air National Guard's 177th Fighter Wing flying a four-ship F-16C formation over Lincoln Financial Field during the national anthem before a Pittsburgh Steelers game on 15 December 2024. It is inside the building this entry is about; it is not the game this entry is about, and no photograph of 28 December 2010 is used here.

SECOND IMAGE

United States Army photograph by 1st Sgt. Robert Hyatt, Signal Corps Regimental Noncommissioned Officer Academy Detachment, VIRIN 101211-A-3085H-040, public domain, by way of DVIDS. Cadets file out of Lincoln Financial Field after the 111th Army-Navy game on 11 December 2010. That is a college fixture and not a professional one, and it is shown here for the seating bowl and the December night: the same building, seventeen days before the game the league moved into it.