In a season unlike any other, the Super Bowl week will not be like any other.
Super Bowl teams always arrive in the game city a week in advance, but this season’s participants are not allowed to reach Tampa, Florida, before the Friday before Super Bowl LV, league sources told ESPN.
If Buffalo Bills and the Green Bay Packers win their conference championship games on Sunday, they have tentative plans to arrive in Tampa on Friday, February 5, two days before the Super Bowl, according to sources.
If the Kansas City Chiefs advance to the Super Bowl, they do not plan to arrive in Tampa until the day before the Super Bowl on February 6, according to sources.
The fourth team involved in Sunday’s league championship games is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who spent the week training in front of the Raymond James Stadium, in view of the Super Bowl LV tracks now hanging in the stadium.
All these changes and adaptations are being made to keep the teams in the COVID-19 prevention routines that followed throughout the season, instead of having to do it in another city. Teams will now be approaching the Super Bowl as if it were any other trip during the season, rather than a trip to the biggest game of the season.
It also means that Super Bowl media day, the Monday night event that has become a staple of the Super Bowl, will be held virtually. Press conferences held with players and coaches from each team will also be held virtually.
Many of the other events associated with the Super Bowl week will also go virtual or be canceled, according to a source. Even post-Super Bowl parties for winning and losing teams are not certain. Teams have the option to fly home immediately after the game.
If the Los Angeles Rams had beaten the Packers last weekend in the division round and advanced to play against the best-ranked Bucs on the road, the NFL would have encountered a situation it never had in its history: the conference championship game Sunday’s would have been the first to be played on the same Super Bowl grass pitch that had been installed before the big game.
Fortunately for the NFL, the Packers beat the Rams, avoiding a problem the NFL did not have to face before – with a team from the Super Bowl host city advancing into the conference championship game.
The NFL installs the Super Bowl field weeks before the game itself, and did so in Tampa. The grass for the Super Bowl pitch is grown months in advance, planned to be revealed during the big game, but an NFC championship game in Tampa would have changed that.
This was not the only change in and around Raymond James Stadium. The league also began to transform the Buccaneers’ parking lot and convert it into fenced areas. Many of the Buccaneers’ tracks surrounding Raymond James Stadium have also been approved by more neutral NFL tracks.