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Tom Brady has six days to play in his tenth Super Bowl and for the first time as a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
It is the first time in 10 games in the title game that Brady is still at home while preparing for the Super Bowl. Usually, the teams would be in the host city of the game, in hotels, dealing with a turbulent week of media availability before the game starts. But nothing is “normal” when it comes to this year’s game.
Even with the Buccaneers arriving at the Super Bowl at their stadium in Tampa, the circumstances of the year mean that there are no hotels, an entirely different media experience and an entirely new way for the 43-year-old Brady to prepare for the Super Bowl. To assist him in this process, Brady said on Monday that his family left home to give him the space and a peaceful environment to prepare for the Kansas City bosses.
“My family is not going back to the city until Saturday,” he said, through Rick Stroud, from Tampa Bay Times. “I really had an empty house for the 12 days before the game. It was the longest time I had to really focus on what I need to do from a football perspective. “
The Buccaneers are the first team to play a Super Bowl at their stadium. The San Francisco 49ers faced the Miami Dolphins in the Super Bowl XIX at the nearby Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, California. But the realities of the year 2020-21 mean that players are actually staying at home instead of staying at local hotels during the week. It’s just one of the many things that make this a new experience for the most experienced Super Bowl participant of all time.
“I have time to get my body right,” said Brady. “There was no trip for our team. It’s a home game. This is very different. We are staying in our own home. This is very different. You don’t have to eat hotel food for a week, this is very different. The stadium will be, I don’t know, 25,000 people. This is going to be different. “
“I have no perspective on this one,” he continued. “Because this is the first time that we have the chance to do the things that we are doing.”