When the NFL postponed the Week 17 Bills–Bengals “Monday Night Football” game after Damar Hamlin collapsed, many voices proposed a seemingly simple solution: push the whole playoff schedule back a week and resume the game in what would have been wild-card weekend , which would move back a week.
This would have been feasible because like every Super Bowl since 2003, and most before, a two-week window is scheduled between the Sunday of the conference title games and the ultimate contest. So it seemed basic to slice off one of those two weeks, complete the Week 17 game, and avoid the complicated changes to seeding the NFL adopted after canceling the MNF game altogether.
But the NFL never seriously contemplated shrinking the free time before the Super Bowl because of the enormous logistical challenges involved. The two-week spacing was once created to hype a new championship, but as the Super Bowl grew, so did the event’s organizational needs.
The Super Bowl Experience is one of the events held at the host site in the two weeks leading up to the game, giving fans interactive NFL activities and experiences. (Kirby Lee/USA Today)
Asked about the benefit of a two-week window, Frank Supovitz, who ran events at the NFL between 2005 and 2014, emailed, “Getting tickets from the league to the teams to the end user sponsors, fans, team and player guests, etc. . (even though they are digital now), who then have to arrange for air travel; getting them into the hotel rooms on hold. All the team graphics in the stadium, on street banners, etc., that might be impossible to customize by the time people arrive. And all the football details like getting end zones painted — it’s already a scramble to get (it) all done in less than two weeks; getting it done in less than one for an event the size of the Super Bowl would be a huge lift.”
With only one week, the four teams competing in the title games would not know whether they were heading home after a loss or flying to the Super Bowl host city immediately after the game. Super Bowl teams today can bring thousands of people, like a club’s entire staff and their families. That would be all but impossible on such an abbreviated turnaround.
Jim Steeg, who oversaw events at the NFL before Supovitz, recalled the Giants’ winning the 1991 NFC Championship Game in San Francisco and taking a charter that night to Tampa for the Super Bowl, getting in at 4 am Monday. That was a year with a one-week gap because the schedule had expanded from 16 to 17 weeks. The logistics of tickets, hotel rooms and such were explained midflight through a closed-circuit broadcast compiled by team general manager George Young, who had executed the planning in case the underdog Giants moved on.
“It’s been done,” Steeg said of the quick turnaround, “but it’s very difficult.”
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The two-week gap dates to the first Super Bowl in 1967 (it didn’t have that moniker until 1969, the first two were called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game). Then-commissioner Pete Rozelle wanted the teams to come in for at least a week before the game to promote the fledgling title contest, played in Los Angeles. That first Super Bowl holds the distinction of being the only one not to sell out. Nearly 62,000 fans attended in the 93,000-seat LA Memorial Coliseum.
Packers legendary coach Vince Lombardi balked at the request to come early, Steeg said, and then mistakenly said he would only do so if the team could stay at Hyatt Rickeys, a famous hotel. The only problem: The hotel, demolished in 2005, was in Palo Alto, Steeg said laughing while telling the story. Lombardi retired and the team stayed in Santa Barbara, 100 miles northwest of LA, and easily broke through to win that first Super Bowl.
“If you go back to the deep history, Rozelle wanted it because he wanted it to be extra hype between the games that were taking place,” Steeg said. “And he thought about getting the two teams there to promote the game. It was important. Remember that, you know, that game didn’t sell out. So you had to have something going on there to create publicity around it to buy tickets. And so, originally, I think he wanted the extra week to be able to promote the game and then it just stayed that way forever and to where the teams had to come in, were required to get there by Monday.”
The Super Bowl quickly gained in popularity, negating the need for an extra week to sell tickets. But the extra week stayed, except often in years with a labor disturbance, an expanded schedule or a national crisis, like 9/11 when the second week of the season was postponed. Over the course of the Super Bowl’s history — the 57th one is scheduled for Feb. 12 in Glendale, Ariz. — only seven times did the spacing between the conference title games and the championship consume only a week (1970, 1983, 1991, 1994, 2000, 2002 and 2003).
Another factor in the two-week gap is the move of the Pro Bowl from the week after the Super Bowl to the week before, which occurred in 2010. And the NFL this year has planned a week of events in Las Vegas topped off with the first-ever Pro Bowl played as a flag football event. The NFL is heavily hyping flag football and so would not have wished to see the Pro Bowl platform scrubbed because of a playoff schedule scramble.
The extra week also gives brands and celebrities more time to hawk products and events surrounding the Super Bowl, which is far more than just a game. It is days of parties, sponsor events, business meetings, fan zones, and countless influencer pitches for things they are paid large amounts to endorse. It’s all part of the commercial and entertainment scrum that is the Super Bowl, so shaving a week off the carnival was always a non-starter.
(Top photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images)
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