In a season unlike any other, Super Bowl week will not be like any other.
Super Bowl teams always arrive in the city one week ahead of time, but participants of this season may not arrive before Friday before Super Bowl LV in Tampa, Florida, league sources told ESPN.
If the Buffalo Bills and Green Bay Packers win their conference game games on Sunday, they have preliminary plans, according to sources, to arrive in Tampa two days before the Super Bowl on Friday, February 5th.
If the Kansas City Chiefs advance to the Super Bowl, according to sources, they do not plan to arrive in Tampa first. The day before the Super Bowl on February 6th.
The fourth team to be involved in the conference games on Sunday is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who trained this week across from Raymond James Stadium, in view of the Super Bowl LV banners now hanging on the stadium .
All of these changes and adjustments are made to keep teams in the COVID-19 prevention routines that they adhere to throughout the 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 travel to the biggest game of the season.
It also means that Super Bowl Media Day, the Monday night event that became a Super Bowl staple, will virtually be done. News conferences held with players and coaches in each team will also be held virtually.
Many of the other events related to Super Bowl week will also be virtual or canceled, according to a source. Even the post-Super Bowl parties for the 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 in the division round this past weekend and pushed through to play the higher-seeded Bucs on their way, the NFL would have encountered a situation it has never had in its history: Sunday, the conference championship game was the first to ever be played on the same Super Bowl grass field that had already been installed before the big game.
Luckily for the NFL, the Packers beat the Rams, averting a problem the NFL has not had before – with a team from the Super Bowl hosting city that played until the conference championship.
The NFL installed the Super Bowl field a few weeks before the game itself, and did so in Tampa. The grass for the Super Bowl field is being grown months in advance, planned to be unveiled 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 converting the Buccaneers’ parking lot and converting it into fenced-in areas. Many of the Buccaneers banners surrounding Raymond James Stadium have also come down in favor of more neutral NFL banners.