The guy charged with keeping Amazon’s data centers up and running says that the NFL could have avoided its blackout black eye for the price of about two-and-a-half Super Bowl ads.

James Hamilton, an Amazon Distinguished Engineer, posted an analysis of Sunday’s blackout to his blog this week. According to him, the NFL could have bought a couple of bus-sized diesel generators, and hooked them up to an industrial-strength uninterruptible power supply system and then simply switched over to backup power when a breaker switched off power from one of the Superdome’s two main power feeds Sunday night.

Throw in a third generator, and the entire price tag would come to about $10 million, Hamilton estimated. He ought to know. He’s the guy who figures out how to keep Amazon’s dozens of data centers from going dark.

That $10 million is not much money compared to the $9.5 billion the NFL brought in last year.

And it could have come even cheaper. We called up a local Louisiana heavy-equipment rental company, who said that for $75,000, they’d let us have a set of three 2MW generators for a couple of weeks. Throw in a $2 million portable UPS system and the cost of switch gear, and other set-up costs and you’re looking at maybe $2.5 million, they reckoned.

The blackout cut power to about half of the New Orleans Superdome for 34 minutes Sunday evening. It led for some awkward television. But more than that, it seemed to change the dynamics of the game. The Ravens had been demolishing their opponents, the San Francisco 49ers. After the blackout, the 49ers came back and nearly stole the Super Bowl.

We still don’t really know what exactly snuffed the lights in Louisiana Sunday night, but the NFL’s response to it was caught on camera by a CBS crew doing a spot on the event. According to the video — and a subsequent account posted by the local power company and the Superdome’s management company — a sensor on the stadium’s power network picked up something abnormal on the network and tripped a circuit breaker, cutting off power from one of the stadium’s main lines, called the A feed. Crews then scrambled to tie in the rest of the stadium’s to the working feed line (that’s the “bus tie” the crew is talking about in the CBS video, below), and then they fired up the stadium’s gas-discharge lighting systems. Restarting these lights, alone, is a 15-minute process.

This isn’t the NFL’s first high-profile blackout. Two years ago, San Francisco’s Candlestick park went dark during a Monday Night Football game after a transformer failure.

There is an investigation underway, but Sunday’s game has already been dubbed the Blackout Bowl, and the league, the city, and the Superdome’s management company, SMG, have already been pretty thoroughly embarrassed.

The NFL couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday. But given everything at stake, the league could probably take a tip or two from the the data center nerds. After all, Amazon’s web services platform is used by so many websites the whole world notices anytime the lights go out.

“I would expect that next year’s event will have backup power,” said Hamilton when reached Wednesday via e-mail. “The economics of it are just too obvious.”