Seven years after the city pulled off a historic upset by acquiring an NFL expansion franchise, the odds were again stacked against Jacksonville.

A lot of skeptics thought it couldn’t be done, but former Jacksonville Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver refused to be deterred over being the underdog.

So, five years after the Jaguars took the field in Sept. 1995, he went big-game hunting for another impactful football experience: Jacksonville hosting a Super Bowl.

Literally, Jacksonville’s ship came in during an NFL owners meeting in Atlanta on Nov. 1, 2000, with the city being awarded Super Bowl XXXIX that was played at then Alltel Stadium on Feb. 6, 2005.

Reflecting on the 20-year anniversary, so much about the circumstances that allowed Jacksonville to land a Super Bowl — and how it managed to make this global spectacle a success in the face of so much skepticism — still resonates to this day.

“I felt the same way when we pursued the Jaguars, the sort of feeling of it being an uphill task,” said Mike Weinstein, then CEO of the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission. “But because we were successful in getting the team, I didn’t think [getting a Super Bowl] was out of the question.”

While the game itself put a stamp on the New England Patriots’ dynasty, winning its third Super Bowl in four years with a 24-21 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles , the triumph for Jacksonville was equally memorable because the city executed a challenge that many doubted it could pull off.

Due to Jacksonville’s lack of quality hotel rooms, it came up with the unique idea of having five cruise ships docked on the St. Johns River, using them as floating hotels to accommodate 3,000-plus guests to meet NFL requirements.

“I’d be lying to say I wasn’t skeptical at first about the idea,” said Jim Steeg, who ran the Super Bowl as the NFL Senior Vice-President of Special Events from 1980-2005. “The first time they presented the cruise ships concept to an NFL committee in 1999, there were doubters.

“Obviously, there were a lot of limitations. But I thought Jacksonville did a great job.”

Michael Kelly, who served as president/CEO of the Super Bowl host committee for 31 months leading up to the game, still marvels at how it all came together.

“I still look back at it with great pride because there was so much to overcome,” said Kelly, now in his sixth year as athletic director at the University of South Florida. “Everyone who had a major role to play made it work.”

Dream Weaver comes through again

Nothing the 90-year-old Weaver accomplished in his stupendous business career can top the No. 1 achievement of acquiring the Jaguars, but he considers getting the Super Bowl a close 1A.

“There’s no question, I’d say it was one of the extreme challenges we had to overcome,” said Weaver. “Nobody thought we’d get a Super Bowl because we were too small of a city.

“I remember [former Miami Dolphins owner] Wayne Huizenga when we voted, saying we all liked Wayne Weaver, but that Miami was the place to have a Super Bowl.”

By the time the NFL owners voted in 2000, Miami had already hosted eight Super Bowls and has since been the SB site three times.

Though Miami Dolphins coaching legend Don Shula and future Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino lobbied the owners on Miami’s behalf, Jacksonville scored another victory over Marino just 10 months after the Jaguars sent him into retirement with a 62-7 victory in the AFC playoffs.

Jacksonville and its competition, Miami and Oakland, failed to achieve the necessary vote on the first three ballots, so it went to a simple majority on the fourth ballot and Jacksonville prevailed.

Now came the hard part: mobilizing an eventual army of 10,000 volunteers over the next four-plus years to help Jacksonville come off looking good under its first global spotlight.

“It was just a huge undertaking,” said former Jacksonville mayor John Delaney, who served in office from 1995-2003. “You can’t believe the detail requirements the NFL has for that thing. You even got to have an ordinance to not have helicopters flying over the stadium during the game.

“You’re doing a major Spic and Span to clean things up.”

It was a double victory of sorts for Jacksonville and Weaver because getting the Super Bowl also served as an impetus for the Jaguars to get multiple amenities put into the stadium, including the escalators and other features around the south end zone.

Alltel Stadium, along with several Jacksonville bridges getting permanent lighting to highlight them, was plenty spruced up for the Super Bowl. Along with the creation of the Northbank Riverwalk extension and the week-long party atmosphere all over the city, Jacksonville took pride in seeing its image receiving a positive makeover.

Those heavily involved in Super Bowl XXXIX believe none of it would have happened without the relationships Weaver built over his first seven years as an NFL owner.

“Everyone liked Wayne Weaver, you couldn’t find one owner that didn’t like him,” said Steeg. “They definitely wanted to help him out.

“It meant a lot to [then commissioner] Paul Tagliabue and [future commissioner] Roger Goodell because they were part of the expansion process that got Jacksonville a team. In those days, the owner was a critical component in cities getting Super Bowls.”

Cruising in a different kind of Super Bowl

While Jacksonville tried bidding for Super Bowls before the Jaguars came along during the Jake Godbold administration, it was a pipe dream without an NFL team.

The truth is, due to the city’s lack of hotel space, Weaver didn’t have a solution for the problem until reading an article about how Barcelona used cruise ships for hotel rooms during the 1992 Summer Olympics.

“I thought, ‘Why couldn’t we do that here?’ “ said Weaver. “We’ve got a great port.”

Little did Super Bowl XXXIX organizers realize the enormity of that challenge, being confronted with issues that popped up after facilitating the rental of those ships.

“We didn’t know what we were doing at one point with the ships, but we stayed with it, trying to address the issues,” Weaver said.

The original cruise ships Jacksonville wanted were not the ones it ended up using, including three from Holland America that were docked at Talleyrand Marine Terminal. The problem with the original selected ships is they were too big to fit under the city’s bridges.

“That was a significant issue,” Steeg said. “The ships they ended up getting didn’t get in until Thursday afternoon and people were checking in Thursday night.”

Weinstein, who put together Jacksonville’s application for the NFL owners, also figured out long before the game that cruise ship economics didn’t work in the city’s favor. Organizers had to improvise because the income from those rooms wasn’t enough to cover the costs of the ship rentals.

“The NFL wanted the rooms, but it was limited in what we could charge for them,” said Weinstein. “We had to bring in more revenue than just the room rates. So we re-sold entertainment and meals on the ships to people that lived in Jacksonville.

“While NFL people in those rooms were at various events around town like the commissioner’s party, we made extra income to make cruise ships financially viable.”

Peter Rummell, co-chairman of the Super Bowl committee with Tom Petway, was once in charge of the Disney cruise line. He put together a scale model of ships around downtown Jacksonville to show NFL owners how it could work as a hotel substitute for the Super Bowl.

“Once they saw how the cruise ships would move around, a lot of the events they were interested in were walking distance,” said Rummell, who retired as CEO of the St. Joe Company. “Guests didn’t have to travel far to get to them. They didn’t have the typical traffic congestion of other Super Bowls.

“There was enormous skepticism before the game and enormous satisfaction when it was over. A lot of people hadn’t been on a cruise ship before and it turned out well.”

As Delaney put it about the big boats: “The novelty actually played out in our favor.”

Pressure on home media to deliver

Super Bowl stakes are monumental for the coaches, players and team employees, but there’s a lot of skin in the game for local media and residents as well.

Having covered seven Super Bowls, the vibe of working one in your own city is vastly different than away from home because a lot more people are paying attention to media coverage in the host city.

The Times-Union editors and sports department appropriately treated Super Bowl XXXIX as the biggest game of our lives, at least until the day when the Jaguars finally get there.

One fun project for me was putting together a package of stories about five legendary Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks — Joe Montana, Joe Namath, Terry Bradshaw, John Elway and Tom Brady — none of whom I had ever interviewed one-on-one and only a couple in a group setting.

Despite planning three months in advance to arrange the interviews, the odds were something might go awry, especially with superstars that have no previous relationship with you.

Everything went smoothly for the first couple months. Bradshaw was incredibly forthcoming about the struggles he had in his early years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, going so far as to say they would have given up on him if he had played in the more modern NFL.

“I thought I was a bust for a while,” Bradshaw told me. “I was so mad, struggling with [head coach] Chuck Noll and struggling with the city. I was absolutely miserable.

“I had lost so much love for the game in those early years. I was trying to prove myself and I drove myself crazy. In today’s NFL, I doubt seriously that I would have made it.”

Keep in mind: this was a four-time Super Bowl championship quarterback acknowledging how, in his own mind, he almost became a failure.

I knew as soon as Bradshaw uttered those words that at least one of my QB stories would have some compelling anecdotes, which is what writers live for.

Super Bowl QBs were clutch for T-U

The package exceeded my expectations for one reason: all five QBs were engaged in those 20-30 minute interviews.

None of them acted like they wanted to get it over with, which is a vibe any writer picks up on almost instantly.

It also helped that public relations people from their NFL teams arranged for me to talk with several head coaches and teammates. Quality stories have no chance of happening without getting proper access.

Brady, interviewed in Dec. 2004, well before he led the Patriots to their third Super Bowl crown in four years, called right at the scheduled time and was totally up front about his flaws, particularly in his college days at Michigan.

“I learned some lessons the hard way,” said Brady. “I remember I was always looking at what other people were doing, thinking this guy had more repetitions and chances to work with the first team in practice. I finally figured the problem wasn’t other people — it was me.”

Brady would go on to say that he felt compelled to outwork everybody, put in extra time in practice and the weight room or else, “I’d be a terrible player.”

Two decades later, that not-so-terrible QB has an NFL-record seven Super Bowl rings. His transparency in that interview is something I’ll never forget.

Montana was reluctant to boast on going 4-0 in his Super Bowls, but ex-Washington Redskins QB legend Joe Theismann delivered this money quote about his adversary: “For other great quarterbacks, you can probably find one game that is sort of their signature. In Montana’s case, his signature was more like a novel. It just reads and reads and reads.”

Namath heckler ‘just pushed the wrong button’

While Elway was cordial and gave me a couple nice anecdotes, his voice over the phone didn’t ooze excitement with nearly the same vigor as Namath.

Broadway Joe was profusely apologetic before our interview began, saying how much he regretted waiting so long to get back to me. I thought we’d have to run the package without him until a former New York Jets athletic trainer, who lived in Jacksonville, put the bug in Namath’s ear about two weeks before the stories ran to give me a call.

Of course, no story about Namath for a Super Bowl special section would be complete without getting the lowdown on his “guarantee” about a 17-point underdog upsetting the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.

Namath had been stewing for a while leading up to the game, feeling the Jets’ chances were being vastly underestimated by the media. There was no plan on his part to issue a guarantee. It was a spontaneous reaction from an acceptance speech for an award he was asked to give at a Miami Touchdown Club dinner three days before the game.

When a loud heckler interrupted Namath to suggest how the Colts would dominate the Jets, he responded: “I got news for you, we’re going to win the game. I guarantee it.”

That’s how the most famous guarantee in sports history took on a life of its own, especially after the Jets pulled out a 16-7 victory, still the greatest upset in Super Bowl history.

“All we heard from everybody was how good the Colts were, and when somebody tells you that you can’t do something after you’ve convinced yourself that you’re pretty good, you take offense to it,” Namath told me. “That heckler just pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. I said it mostly out of anger.”

Remember that iconic picture of Namath walking off the Orange Bowl field and wagging his index finger to the crowd in celebration of the Jets’ victory?

I felt the same way after hanging up the phone with all those Super Bowl quarterbacks. They didn’t even know me and still delivered when I needed them to be clutch.

Will city get another Super Bowl?

It doesn’t feel like the question of whether a Super Bowl ever returns to Jacksonville is debatable.

After all, the big game is going to be played for a long, long time and the city’s NFL venue, EverBank Stadium, is going to undergo a $1.4 billion renovation.

Come 2028, it will be one of the league’s nicest facilities, sporting all the suites and so many bells and whistles owners want in a Super Bowl.

But as Jacksonville knew all too well the last time, the lack of quality hotel rooms remains an issue. In this Super Bowl era, more NFL cities are getting into the mix for the big game, so Jacksonville will likely need a lot more downtown development before it can legitimately bid to host another SB game.

“The stadium will certainly be Super Bowl ready,” said Jaguars president Mark Lamping. “Now, we need to get downtown Jacksonville and surrounding areas Super Bowl ready. That means more hotel rooms and more things for people to do before and after the game.”

Based on what Steeg is hearing about the upcoming Super Bowl from people in New Orleans, he’s dubious about Jacksonville’s chances of landing another one.

“I’d say it’ll be tough,” said Steeg. “I bet I’ve gotten five phone calls from writers saying New Orleans is now too small for the game, and they have 26,000 hotel rooms there between downtown and the airport.

“That’s something [Jacksonville] is going to have to look at as far as housing. Remember, there’s 35,000-40,000 people who don’t go to the game that need hotel rooms.”

New stadium an asset, more development needed

No doubt, Jaguars owner Shad Khan at some point will want to show off the city’s new stadium on the world’s biggest football stage, but it’s a question of timing.

“If I was still there [as owner], once the new stadium gets here, I’d want to be in the mix to go get another Super Bowl,” said Weaver.

For Khan, the reality is he needs more quality hotels in northeast Florida than just his Four Seasons, being built across the street from the Jaguars’ stadium, to satisfy NFL owners. They likely won’t be amenable next time to the idea of using cruise ships as floating hotels.

Steeg compared Jacksonville in 2005 to when Tampa first hosted a Super Bowl in 1984, saying the only difference was that Tampa “had Orlando sitting an hour away. That was their cruise ships.”

Jacksonville suffered a bit in the Super Bowl aftermath when the economy began taking a downturn in 2007 and ‘08, which stalled a lot of growth.

Now, Khan’s heavy investment in the city may well spur development. However, the question remains of how much time will it take for downtown and surrounding areas to grow enough to make Jacksonville a SB host contender?

For now, any talk of Jacksonville and the Super Bowl is about a glorious time 20 years ago when the city was the center of the football universe.

“The whole cruise ship thing was odd, a little strange,” said Los Angeles Times writer Sam Farmer, who has covered every Super Bowl since 1997. “But when a city like Jacksonville or a smaller market like Indianapolis gets it, the city flips over it. You felt like the whole city was into it because it was a big deal for that city, a galvanizing event.”

What made the Super Bowl XXXIX game eventful was it solidified the Patriots as a dynasty. But for Jacksonville, its people and the game’s organizers, the memory of being in the global spotlight is still a source of pride not easily forgotten.

“The town was on fire, it was a week-long party,” said Delaney. “Bay Street was Mardi Gras. It was a heckuva lot of fun.”

It’d be a lot more fun if Jacksonville got to host another Super Bowl in a swanky new stadium. Even better, if the Jaguars were in the game.