There have been nine Super Bowls in New Orleans, and not all of them have brought the best of luck to NFL Films. We got robbed twice there, got food poisoning, and my hotel room was broken into on the day the Bears played the Patriots in January 1986.

Steve Sabol (1942–2012), longtime president and creative force behind NFL Films, often recounted the behind-the-scenes realities of covering major events. This remark looks back on NFL Films’ repeated trips to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, contrasting the glamour of the game with the logistical and personal mishaps his crews experienced there—robberies, illness, and a hotel break-in. The reference to “the day the Bears played the Patriots in January 1986” points to Super Bowl XX (played January 26, 1986, in New Orleans), anchoring the anecdote in a specific production trip during one of the most famous Super Bowls of the era.

The quote uses darkly comic accumulation—robbed twice, food poisoning, then a personal break-in—to puncture the glamorous mythology surrounding Super Bowl week. Sabol’s point is less about New Orleans as such than about the unromantic realities of production work behind iconic sports storytelling: even as NFL Films helped craft the league’s epic narrative, its staff dealt with ordinary vulnerabilities and logistical hazards on the road. By naming a specific Super Bowl (the 1986 Bears–Patriots game), he also underscores how professional milestones can be inseparable from private memories of discomfort or violation. The remark humanizes a celebrated media institution by foregrounding contingency, risk, and the cost of being present where history is made.