Last year, the NFL had a team game at its home stadium for the first time in a Super Bowl. On Sunday, the league will see another first, delaying some of its preparations for this year’s big game.
The NFC Championship game between the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers marks the first time a conference title game has been held at the Super Bowl venue. Katie Keenan, the NFL’s senior director of event operations, said the league has been preparing for this emergency, but the work they can do at SoFi Stadium has been delayed.
“It’s setting us back a couple of weeks in certain areas, but we’ve still been able to get a lot of prep work done that we started in early January,” Keenan said.
While the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were making history for the Super Bowl last year, all three of their NFC playoff games were underway. The Rams won the NFC West, which guaranteed them at least one postseason game.
The league began operations at the Hollywood Park location on January 10, the day after the regular season. Some of the scaffolding work with tents and other hospitality areas was evident when the Rams hosted the Arizona Cardinals in an NFC wild card round game on Jan. 17.
More fence lines, supplemental lighting and Super Bowl decorations will be put up Sunday, but the league and the Rams have worked together to ensure parking isn’t severely impacted. Some of the hospitality facilities for the February 13 game will be pre-built and installed starting Monday.
Most of the actual work at the stadium will not begin until Monday. Normally at this point the international booths and other media areas would almost be set up, but it didn’t happen because that would involve the dismantling of some seats.
Keenan said some of the pre-wiring was installed for these.
“When you’ve pushed a five-week build up to two weeks, there are just a few things you need to start earlier,” she said.
Keenan also said her staff used lessons learned from Minnesota four years ago to improve contingency planning. In 2018, the Vikings had a home game in the Divisional Round, three weeks before the Super Bowl.
“This site is so spacious that we can build on campus. We’re getting better at that because it seems like the potential playoff team has been the host city of the Super Bowl for the last few years,” she said.
“Starting in November, we started building contingencies for each round. It’s no secret that the championship game scenario is the most challenging scenario because it obviously shortened everything.”
The only advantage of the SoFi Stadium is that it is an artificial surface, which means that the league does not have to install a new field. Starting Monday, however, the NFL will have the building all to themselves.
“It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together because a lot of things related to traditional SoFi and Rams have to move out, and then all of our stuff has to move in. It’s going to be quite an orchestrated effort on Monday morning if we can slam the ground,” Keenan said.
Comments are closed.