If you’re looking to assign blame for Super Bowl 48’s train-to-the-game fiasco, don’t point the finger at NJ Transit. Responsibility for Sunday’s embarrassing human gridlock outside rail stations in Secaucus and MetLife Stadium belongs to NY/NJ Super Bowl Host Company boss Alfred Kelly and his 31 full-time paid staffers who had nothing but time to develop a plan to get 82-thousand football fans in and out of the Meadowlands on a day ideally suited for moving a crowd of that size.

Kelly is the multi-millionaire financial services executive hired three years ago to plan every last detail of the NFL’s first Super Bowl at an outdoor, cold weather site. New York was able to break the League’s pattern of playing the game under either a dome or in warm climate cities because the Jets and Giants built the new stadium in East Rutherford with their own money. The game was a reward for the lack of hassle involved in erecting the new building. It didn’t hurt that Giants co-owner John Mara is considered to be popular and influential among NFL owners.

While nobody can guarantee an interesting, tightly-contested game on the field, New York and New Jersey together have the infrastructure and then some to insure a pleasant experience for the tens of thousands of visitors who come here. Hotel rooms were said to be in abundance at rates below what you’d pay other times of the year. The weather was decent. There were a bunch of pro and college sporting events scheduled in the days before Sunday. New York City doesn’t need to do much to wow people. It just does. Restaurants, bars, live entertainment, energy, crazy scenes on the streets. It’s a wonderful place to host the big get-together any time of the year. Yet somehow, Kelly and the folks charged with consideration of the event’s logistics messed up badly on perhaps the most important component of the experience.

Despite possessing a firm hand over a mostly out-of-town audience inclined to obey game-day instructions, Kelly and the NY/NJ Host Company allowed way more fans to opt for the train than the capacity of that mode of transport allowed.

If you didn’t already know, the Meadowlands rail link has been a borderline bust from the get-go. The train station at the sports complex is reachable only via Secaucus, five miles to the south of the Stadium. The MetLife drop-off point is a dead-end depot on a point-to-point set of two tracks. From New York City‘s Penn Station, you have to go out of your way to get to Secaucus and then back up north to the Stadium. What happened last Sunday has occurred repeatedly on a smaller scale before and after concerts, soccer games and NFL contests since the line opened in 2009. If Kelly had taken that train to a NFL game – or one of the U2 shows on the 360 degrees tour – he would have known of its limitations. Instead, he somehow allowed some 30-thousand Super Bowl ticket holders to get jammed up on a famously-constrained piece of the transit grid that has well-documented trouble moving one-third that total before and after an event.

What should make Kelly, Mara and the NFL red-faced is that they knew the rough math going in. They knew they had only 12-thousand parking spaces (down from the usual 28-thousand for a regular event) and they knew how many bus tickets were sold (40-thousand or so). Since taxi drop-offs were banned, it had to be obvious in the run-up that the train’s capacity limitations would tested way beyond reasonable.

There should have been a much greater bus push. Sunday is a perfect day to run buses out of the mammoth-sized Port Authority Bus Terminal given all of its unused capacity on a non-work day. To insure more reliable head counts, the NFL could have printed pre-paid transportation arrangements on the back of game tickets.

Instead, at least twenty-thousand game attendees beyond what the train could handle caused a miserable pre and post-game bottleneck for the 30-thousand who were explicitly advised to ride the rails. What’s frustrating and unfortunate is that this region has the greatest public transit infrastructure in the country. What should have been this event’s strength turned into a train wreck. The takeaway from this event was a massive mob of overheated fans crammed in tight spaces with nowhere to go.

And then on Monday, those taking planes back home after about 10 AM got stuck because eight inches of snowfall decimated the departure slates of air carriers that had planned and sold out additional flights to accommodate the numbers. That part of it was unavoidable. So was the mismatch of a game.

But you wonder if Jerry Jones, Arthur Blank, the Rooney’s and the commissioner go back to the dome and palm tree routine and write off 48 as a failed experiment. Too bad, if that’s the case, but New York had a good chance to make a good impression and blew its shot.

-Most of those who wrote about the life and death of prolific NYC actor Philip Seymour Hoffman omitted the work that may have best showcased his immense talent. Jack Goes Boating was Hoffman’s lone directorial effort in the movies although he directed on the theatre stage many times over. His leading man portrayal of Jack in the film connected with me pretty deeply. The Post and News should probably quit writing about the guys on Mott Street who may – or may not have – sold Hoffman the junk found in his place on Bethune. Nobody cares about that. What’s important to know about heroin is that it’s the one high you don’t want to try. Hoffman was great, great, great at what he did. As Jack, he played the gentle, awkward, working-class solo guy in the big city and he really nailed it.