Ray Lewis has a theory about the lights going out in the Superbowl. You can sign up for Peyton's Places on Disney's new streaming service, Disney+. There is a time and a place for it. There was fear about a terrorist attack, an anxious sprint down 280 feet of stairs, and uncertainty about a mysterious guy in a dark uniform. It was supposed to be remembered for being the first Super Bowl featuring brothers as opposing head coaches, but that narrative has changed. The lights went off at the Super Bowl according to John Harbaugh. The lights went out in New Orleans. It took 34 minutes for the Superdome to lose half of its lights. Colin Kaepernick scored on a 15-yard run with 9:57 left in the fourth quarter to cut the 49ers' deficit to two. The Ravens were able to hold on for the win. The commanders are trying to replace the person.
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The Ravens will play the Saints in the Superdome on Monday night. The league's most famous power failure took place 10 years ago.
Suggs said during a recent team reunion that they have never gotten back to why this happened. "Because we got the ring, that's all that matters."
The Super Bowl featured an impromptu game of freeze tag, a motivational speech, and conspiracy theories.
There were a lot of questions. Lewis had a lot of questions. I think about that whenever I turn on my lights. The lights went out in the Super Bowl.
The people who experienced it tell the story here.
The Ravens scored on their first two possessions of the second half to take a commanding lead. The power went out at 7:38 p.m. after Arthur Jones sacked the quarterback to set up a third-and-long. The state of Connecticut
Lewis: This is not a movie. This is not Hollywood. This is real time. And I'm saying we get off the field right here, it's a wrap. They're done. And it's like cling-cling [the lights go out]. I said, "What?"
Suggs: It was one of those things, like, "All right, just turn the switch back on. Somebody hit the switch, accidentally hit the light switch off." But when they didn't come back on in the first 10 or 15 minutes, we were like, "All right. What, we're gonna delay the Super Bowl for a day or two?" I didn't know what [NFL commissioner] Roger [Goodell] was up to.
Jacoby Jones: You knew they were about to punt the ball to me, right? I just ran it back [108 yards for a touchdown]. Then, somebody was at Buffalo Wild Wings and hit the button.
Solomon Wilcots, CBS sideline reporter: I was thinking terrorist attack or potential public mass [incident]. In our country, that stuff's even to this day, it's etched on our mind. I started to walk for the tunnel. I have a wife and children. I want to get back to my family.
Lewis: Guys are in huddles and they're like, Man, suppose it's a terrorist attack. And now the game is irrelevant. So now you have to put the game down and say, I'm done with the game because who knows what the freak is about to happen. And why won't they tell us something? Nobody gave us an answer.
Joe Flacco, former Ravens QB: I was thinking, all right, we're in the Super Bowl, it's just a stadium [thing], the lights went out. They have to be able to get them back on. You know, it's the Super Bowl. This can't be happening. So I just had trust or faith in the fact that we were in the biggest game in the world, and it was just going to continue to go.
Jim Harbaugh, former 49ers coach: First reaction was "OK, well, we know what to do. We've already had two of these." The generator blew. That's what happened at Candlestick [Park]. Had [that] happen to us in a preseason game, and then either a Sunday night game or Monday night game against the Steelers. So we knew we'd be going back into the locker room, it'd be at least 30 minutes or more. So we were pretty experienced.
Over 71,000 fans were waiting in the Superdome, where the escalators had stopped working, credit-card machines had stopped working, and the concourses were only illuminated by a small bank of emergency lighting. The 49ers had to stay on the field since their locker room was on the west side of the stadium that was affected by the power failure.
Suggs: It was Ray Lewis' last game, and he was over there on the bike. He's still being Ray Lewis, trying to go over defenses. We were like, "Ray, the lights are out, man. We can't play football right now, you know what I'm saying?" But Ray wasn't going to lose his last game, and we weren't going to lose it for him, either.
John Harbaugh: I was trying to figure out what the heck we were doing in terms of keeping our guys warmed up. We rested for a while, and we started doing some stretching stuff.
Jacoby Jones: Me and Torrey [Smith, Ravens wide receiver] were playing freeze tag. We were just running around on the field. That's how you stayed loose. They were saying, "Let's stretch." Stretch? I ain't never stretched in my life.
Wilcots: I begin to communicate with the [TV] truck and cover the story. I'd like to say that we had wonderfully trained, calm people who were prone to leadership in crises. But it was the opposite. It was screaming and chaos with five people in my ear trying to say, "Hey, what do we do?"
Joe Larrew, side judge: [Head referee] Jerome Boger and I are on the field. Some guy in a black uniform, he looked like military, law enforcement, black ops, he said, "I need to report back on your plan. What are you going to do?" Jerome and I look at each other. I said, "Well, when they tell us to start the game, we're going to start the game." And he looks at us, and I thought maybe he would get the sense that I was trying to be funny, but he looks at me and says, "Roger that." And then he turns around and walks away.
I asked if he remembered the movie "Die Hard". The FBI came into the scene and took control. "That's Agent Johnson from 'Die Hard'!" I exclaimed. It would be very unusual for us to deal with someone in a uniform.
John Harbaugh: We had to practice over at the Saints [practice facility] on [Thursday] night because the [Tulane baseball] field was too hard. So at the end of practice it was getting dark, and really it was too dark to practice. And we had two more plays and the song came on, one of my favorite songs, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. [Near the end of the delay], I told the guys: "I'll remind you of that Motown song. There ain't no mountain high enough, and there ain't no valley low enough, and there's nothing that's going to keep us from winning this championship. Not this, and not nothing. We're going to win this game, no matter how long it takes."
Jim Harbaugh: I handled it the way we had handled it the two previous times [the 49ers experienced delays], and that was something that had worked. It's usually 10 minutes of loosening up and then we'll play again, just like we've done the last two times that this happened to us. Just save your energy. There's no sense in having any nervous energy.
Flacco: We probably should have done a lot more [during the delay]. We hadn't been out there as an offense since the second-to-last drive of the first half. We came out of a really, really long halftime, too, and we ran the opening kickoff back and they got the ball. We probably didn't have the ball for an hour. We came back flat.
Lewis, Suggs and Jones have said in the past that they don't believe the incident was intentional. During his speech, Lewis mentioned it. Suggs has said that the commissioner wanted to stop Baltimore's steam. The Ravens were about to run away with the victory according to Jones.
Jacoby Jones: That [power failure] was Vegas. I'm born and raised from New Orleans. The lights ain't go out in the Superdome during [Hurricane] Katrina. But it does in the Super Bowl?
Suggs: When I was younger, I was kind of a rebel. We'll never know what happened. But yeah, I used to always stir the pot and was like, "We're messing up the point spread, so they hit the lights on us."
John Harbaugh: I do think there was a second shooter for [President John F.] Kennedy, but I don't necessarily buy into this particular [conspiracy theory].
Lewis: What made those lights go out at that time? At that time. Why not go out in the second quarter? Why not go out in the first quarter, when the game was close? When our run was ready to happen, the lights go out. How at this perfect time did that happen?
John Harbaugh: Ray will never be convinced. He'll always believe there was a conspiracy. But what's his theory?
Lewis: Just imagine in a movie, somebody's hand on that switch, and they say, "It's about to get out of hand. Hit the switch." I don't know if that's the way it played out, but I will tell you, I just want to know. I really do. I want to know how did that happen in a game with so much on the line and so much going on and one of the greatest historic places ever to play a game of football, period. And that happens.
Flacco: Listen, I can go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole with the best of 'em. But in this case, it just kind of struck me as something happened. I chalk it up to something malfunctioning. Maybe Beyonce's [halftime] show went a little bit too crazy and the lights went out.
Lewis: Beyonce performed and the lights were working, blinking on and off. And then we get out there and we can't get them on. Timing is everything. I just don't know. Somebody knows something. That's what I'm asking. I want to know that person who knows something, and that's the person I've been looking for the last 10 years. I ain't found him yet.
The Superdome's cables and switch gear were replaced by Entergy six months before the Superbowl. In the week leading up to the game, CBS had trouble with the electrical current. The upper bowl's lights went out for no apparent reason during Bey's rehearsal and her show was put on a generator. It didn't stop the power going out.
Frank Supovitz, former NFL senior vice president for events: When the lights went out on the west side [of the Superdome], I had this sinking feeling, I won't tell you I didn't. There was this release of adrenaline all of a sudden, and we said, "Holy smoke, we've got a problem, Houston, and we've got to set about fixing it."
Doug Thornton is the facilities manager for the Superdome. The concessions are not open. The 49ers locker room is located on the west side. Both teams want to leave the field, but they cannot. We can't allow the Ravens to leave because the 49ers can't leave. The people in the stadium stayed calm because both teams stayed on the field.
Supovitz: There was just this incredible moment of uncertainty. We didn't know what had happened. We didn't know why it happened. But the first thing that we asked ourselves was, "What do we tell people?"
We had to send a message to the PA. Because we weren't running on generated power in the control booth, we had to tear a sheet of paper out of the book and run it to the PA in the booth, which was fascinating.
Supovitz: The heroes of the day really were the stadium operations team, because they knew when something like this was happening, they had to shut off all the unessential power in the building. It was a good thing they did, because had they not, the other side of the building would've gone dark. That was something we would never have recovered from.
It's important that the equipment is adjusted so that it doesn't sense an overload. The power company and the equipment's manufacturer failed to calibrate the electrical equipment. After a long investigation, this was determined. The power went out a quarter mile away from the Superdome, which everyone thought was the cause of the power failure. It became our problem because it wasn't our fault.
Supovitz: After the power was restored, one of the first questions I asked the stadium director was, "Can you tell me this isn't going to happen again?" Because we didn't actually know what had happened, other than for some reason this power cable, this feeder cable had failed. So is it going to happen again? And his response to me was really chilling. He said, "I don't know. I can't tell you that. It could."
Thornton ran down from the top. It was close to the bottom of the stadium. The stairs were taken down by us. We didn't want to go up the stairs. As soon as we could, we ran down the steps to the engineering room. The people were looking at the switch gears. We told them not to touch anything. Don't leave it the way it is. The third and fourth quarter were nerve-racking for us.
Supovitz: That was the longest half of football I have ever worked. I prayed that they were going to keep the ball on the ground and weren't going to do a lot of passing. I wanted the clock to keep moving and that we could get the game finished before anything else happened in the building.
Up to that point, the Super Bowl was perfect. It made me sick to my stomach to know that something happened outside of the building that you had no idea about. I was upset for a long time. I was in a depressed state and wondered what could have been.
After the 49ers missed the 2-point conversion, the game was tied at 31-31. Tucker kicked a field goal and the Ravens gave up a safety with four seconds left in the game. Baltimore needed Josh Bynes to tackle Ted Ginn at the end of the game in order to win the Super Bowl. Before the Ravens kicked to Ginn, Flacco was overheard joking with teammates that they should run from the sideline to tackle Ginn.
Flacco: I obviously wasn't serious. It was just a funny way to get some nervous energy out. It was one of those hypothetical questions that we could talk about at the dinner table. Like, "Man, I wonder if we did that, what would happen? Would they give the guy a touchdown?"
Suggs: If the lights had never went out, we probably could have put up 56 points on them. But we'll never know.
Flacco: And thankfully I don't care, because we won the game. But it's one of those crazy things. When I watch that game with my kids, and specifically the end of the game, I know we won, but you still get a little nervous because of how close it ended up being.
Larrew: Anytime somebody sees my ring or they find out that I worked the Super Bowl, I'll say, "Yes, I worked Super Bowl XLVII." The first thing they bring up is, that's the one with the blackout. It's not about Baltimore beating San Francisco or what happened on the field. It was about the fact that we had the blackout. It's a 100% likelihood that I'll hear about that before anything else.
John Harbaugh: You dream as a coach to win the Super Bowl, and you see all the different -- Jimmy Johnson, Bill Parcells -- and all the different celebrations. The guys get carried off, the Gatorade showers and stuff. I look around, it's like there's nobody near me. It's like, where'd everybody go? They're running around celebrating.
They probably knew he had to speak to Jim. It isn't a normal coach. You won't shake a coach's hand and say "good game." I felt bad for him because we shared a room for 17 years. All the time, we talk. I had to get my courage up so that I could say hello, but he was disappointed.
Lewis: The way it happened, it means I live the rest of my life as champion. So I don't know if I want the lights to go out again, if I had to replay it. But them going out, it worked in our favor at the end of the day because we won.
Suggs: When you get that confetti to fall down, and it's in your [team] colors, you've reached the pinnacle. You've reached the mountaintop with your brothers. It's the greatest feeling in the world. I've always said, "I'm not going to say it's better than watching your child being born, but it's close. It's close." So, had we fallen short and didn't win it, I probably would've been like, "Yo, it was the lights' fault."
Kevin and Adam are college football reporters.
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