In a different season than any other, Super Bowl week will also 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 arrive in Tampa, Florida, earlier than the Friday before Super Bowl LV, league sources told ESPN.
If the Buffalo Bills and Green Bay Packers win the 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 bosses 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 conference championship games is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who spent the week practicing across from Raymond James Stadium, in front of the Super Bowl LV banners now hanging from the stadium.
All of these changes and adaptations are being made to keep teams in the COVID-19 prevention routines they have followed all season, rather than having to do so in another city. Teams will now approach the Super Bowl like any other trip during the season, rather than a trip to the biggest game of the season.
It also means that the Super Bowl media day, the Monday night event that became a staple of the Super Bowl, will be practically done. The press conferences that took place with players and coaches from each team will also be done practically.
Many of the other events associated with Super Bowl week will become virtual or canceled, according to a source. Not even post-Super Bowl games for winning and losing teams are safe. Teams have the option to fly home immediately after the match.
If the Los Angeles Rams had beaten the Packers last weekend in the divisional round and advanced to play the Bucs in the top position, the NFL would have encountered a situation it has never had in its history: the game of Sunday’s conference championship would have been the first to ever be played on the same grass field in the Super Bowl that had already been installed before the big game.
Fortunately for the NFL, the Packers defeated the Rams, avoiding a problem the NFL didn’t have to face until now – a team from the Super Bowl host city advancing to the conference championship game.
The NFL set up the Super Bowl a few weeks before the actual game and did it in Tampa. The grass for the Super Bowl field 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 has also begun to turn the Buccaneers’ parking lot into fenced areas. Many of the Buccaneers banners surrounding Raymond James Stadium have also gone down in favor of more neutral NFL banners.