Super Bowl LI XXXVIII in 2004, which also featured the New England Patriots against that season's NFC South champion Carolina Panthers. It was also the third time the Super Bowl has been played in Houston, with Super Bowl VIII in 1974 having been held at Rice Stadium. With the Astros baseball team reaching the World Series eight months later, Houston would become just the fourth city to host both the Super Bowl and Fall Classic in the same calendar year, following San Diego (1998), Detroit (2006) and Arlington, Texas (2011); and the first among the four to win the Major League Baseball championship.
Super Bowl sales taxes failed to pass at the ballot box, and opposition by local business leaders and politicians increased, Kansas City eventually withdrew its request to host the game. Super Bowl XLIX was then eventually awarded to University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. In 2011, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said, "[The Super Bowl is] commonly known as the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States." According to "Forbes", 10,000 prostitutes were brought to Miami in 2010 for the Super Bowl. "Snopes" research in 2015 determined that the actual number of prostitutes involved in a typical Super Bowl