By The music is booming, the lights are turned down low. The series of customary hype videos have played, and the crowd is being egged on to cheer by the stadium hosts.
A marching band takes the field as the tension rises. Finally, the players take the field and it’s time.
The press conferences can finally begin!
Opening Night at the Super Bowl, the event formerly known as Media Day, is what happens when a usually dull press gathering becomes an audience-friendly spectacle. What was once a Tuesday afternoon event full of reporters asking about football with the occasional silliness is now a full-blown Monday night event, complete with all the trappings of the build-up to a NFL football game.. What was once a Tuesday afternoon event full of reporters asking about football with the occasional silliness is now a full-blown Monday night event, complete with all the trappings of the build-up to the NFL’s biggest game.
Except, you know – it’s basically a press conference.
Super Bowl Opening Night is a bewildering sight of grandeur, spectacle and the mundane business of people asking other people questions. And yet, there were still thousands of screaming fans inside of the cavernous Caesars Superdome hoping to get a glimpse of their heroes and maybe score an autograph or a selfie.
The first loud cheer of the night set the tone for this intrepid reporter. As the media walks onto the field about 20 minutes before the Philadelphia Eagles are set to take their place under the lights, a big cheer goes up. The target of those screams: Guillermo Rodriguez, Jimmy Kimmel’s lovable sidekick on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
The scene is reminiscent of the early stages of a music festival. The crowd – thousands strong but still not even filling one side of the lower bowl of the more than 75,000 seats in the Superdome – is enthusiastic but sparse. Explosions of color all around the iconic dome that’s hosting its 11th edition of the Super Bowl – those New Orleans mainstays of purple, green and yellow – make up for the dimness.
The Soul Rebels, a New Orleans-based brass band, are filling the place with music but the lack of people in all those seats means the sound bounces around like a fumbled football. The field itself is protected from the mass of reporters and other media figures who are milling the sidelines, save for the stage that the Rebels are playing on.
The figures on the sideline have such an incredible range that it almost has to be seen to be believed. There are the grizzled reporters who have been doing this for decades. There are Super Bowl rookies staring around the place with eyes as wide as dinner plates (this reporter falls into that camp), there are members of the international media who have flown from around the world to be here.
And there’s also a guy dressed like the Genie from Disney’s “Aladdin,” encouraging players to make a wish with his face painted completely blue. There’s even two guys dressed up like Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni and Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, Aloha shirt and all.
Before the Eagles enter, the cheerleaders from both teams perform a mostly coordinated routine alongside their teams’ mascots. A hype video plays, with bass so intense that chests are rattling all around the Superdome.
There’s a slight break in programming before yet another hype video plays. Once that’s finished, the St. Augustine High School Purple Knights Marching Band begins to play and walks onto the playing surface, trailed by the Eagles in their all-white Super Bowl sweatsuits.
If the goal was to build the atmosphere to a fever pitch, the Eagles – calmly walking onto the stage set up between the 30 and 40-yard lines – did not get the memo. Their vibe could not be more different than the spectacle that preceded them.
With that, the players disperse to their assigned podium or mill about on the sidelines of the field as the questions begin to fly. It’s not exactly the most peaceful work environment – music continues to boom through the sound system whenever interviews from other podiums are not being shown on the big screen, also at top volume. It makes it nearly impossible to hear the questions being asked or the answers being given unless you’re right next to a speaker or the person you’re interviewing.
The topics of the Q-and-As themselves veer wildly. One minute, a player is giving a detailed answer about all the work it took for him to be on a team that’s going to the Super Bowl. In the next, they’re being ambushed by a Nickelodeon social media producer to name five cartoon characters in less than 30 seconds. At one point, Eagles star running back Saquon Barkley ended up with a Nickelodeon blimp for reasons that were not clear thanks to the din in the room.
Players and coaches roam all over the sidelines for interviews, but occasionally they have the option of stopping for a quick game of Madden in a setup in the southeast corner of the field. It appears the only matchup available is Chiefs-Eagles – it’s unclear if any player was forced to play as their future opponents on Sunday instead of their own team.
The players hardly leave empty handed. All manners of gifts are passed up to them from the throng of people in front of their podiums. Chiefs superstar Travis Kelce made out with a couple of soccer jerseys emblazoned with his name on the back. Quarterback Patrick Mahomes got a pillow of some sort. The public relations staffers standing guard on either side of the podium were also turned into baggage handlers as the gifts kept coming.
The night is overall a light-hearted moment in what has been an increasingly serious few months for the players taking the field on Sunday. Every game toward the end of the regular season and every second of each playoff game is so filled with stakes and anxiety that it’s hard for fans to breathe, let alone the guys on each team.
From Monday night onward, it’s back to business. The teams have media availabilities for more football-centric questions the next few days before they hunker down in final preparations for the biggest game of the season. But that tension, that feeling of being in the final stretch run, is still evident if you really look for it.
One of those moments came when Cleveland Browns quarterback Jameis Winston, working for Fox Sports during Opening Night, pops up to ask Mahomes a question. As Winston, one of the league’s most charismatic figures, finished up his back-and-forth with Mahomes, the ebullient quarterback-turned-reporter made a call back to his famous “eat a W” pregame speech seven years ago by tossing Mahomes a W-shaped cookie.
“Man, I know you’re in it to win it. Will you please eat this W with me?” Winston said, tossing the cookie like a Frisbee over the heads of camera operators and reporters.
Mahomes caught half of it – it broke upon colliding with his hand – and made a motion like he was going to take a bite. But with just a few days before a chance at a historic three-peat, the Kansas City quarterback was taking no chances with his nutrition.
With Winston’s blessing, he put the cookie remnants on the table and went on to his next question.
It was a scene emblematic of Opening Night in New Orleans: Funny and quirky but everything is geared toward Sunday. Kickoff for Super Bowl LIX between the Chiefs and Eagles is set for 6:30 p.m. ET.
