What It's Like To Cover A Super Bowl
BOSTON (CBS) -- Sixty hours have passed since Malcolm Butler's interception, and to be honest, it's still hard to fully process what happened. The Super Bowl between the Patriots and Seahawks more than exceeded expectations, which is really saying something, because expectations were sky-high. The two teams exchanged haymakers in the first half before Seattle scored 17 unanswered points. Tom Brady's offense rallied with two fourth-quarter touchdown drives, leading up to the now-famous goal-line interception.
You know all of this by now, of course, as post-Super Bowl life has officially resumed. It's always a letdown when you realize that football season is officially over, so before officially moving on, I thought I'd share what it's like covering a Super Bowl. I just covered my first, so it was all a fresh experience to me.
6 a.m.: Wake up. It's about a 30-minute drive to Glendale on a normal day, but this is no normal day. I stayed in Chandler, Ariz., the same town where the Patriots stayed. It's about 15 miles southwest of Phoenix, and about 30 miles southwest of the stadium. It's still dark out, obviously, but there's also a dense fog warning. It's not exactly the type of weather you expect to encounter in the desert, but then again it had rained most of the week, so nothing's too surprising.
7:15 a.m.: The WBZ crew meets in the hotel lobby, finalizing the plans for the day. There's a lot of moving parts in this operation. While most of us are dressed and ready for work, Scott Zolak came breezing through the lobby in his workout gear. I wouldn't be surprised if he was out running all night long.
8:15 a.m.: We arrived at the stadium, but we don't have our parking passes yet, so we dropped off the on-air folks who have live television to do before heading out to get the parking passes.
8:30-10:30 a.m.: We drove up to Peoria, Ariz., to pick up our parking passes. They're operating this system out of the box office of the spring training home of the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres. Driving here was pretty dangerous, because the fog is so bad. Taking a left off a main street required you to take a leap of faith that no cars were coming at you. Fortunately, I guessed right, or else I wouldn't be blogging today.
The system is not exactly a well-oiled machine, as evidenced by the two-hour wait. The line built up to about 100 people deep, and most folks had to wait even longer after they reached the window. It was a mess.
One highlight of waiting in line for that long was that I got to see a guy with an Aaron Hernandez jersey, patched up with Tim Wright's nameplate covering the Hernandez name. That's resourceful. Those jerseys are pricey. Personally, I'd have gone with "Moss," but still, not bad.
10:30-11:15 a.m.: After a pit stop at Dunkin Donuts (Dunks in Arizona -- who knew??), the nine-mile drive back to the stadium takes about an hour, which is to be expected. Super Bowl traffic is no joke, especially in this fog:
https://vine.co/v/OFnxt3lgQP5
11:15 a.m.-12:15 p.m.: After parking about a quarter-mile from the stadium, the trek inside begins. This stadium is massive, so walking around it is no easy feat, I quickly learned. Security gates were set up as a perimeter about 1,500 yards around the stadium, making such a walk even longer. The gates aren't open yet, but fans are lined up by the hundreds waiting to get in.
The sun came out during this walk, and the sun in Arizona is hot. Sunscreen would have been a good thing to have packed.
12:15-12:45 p.m.: At long last I reached the media entrance, where we media folk were herded like cattle through a winding section of rows. It was here that I created a new NFL controversy, known only as #GolfCartGate.
It didn't quite pick up as much steam as #DeflateGate, but they each had an equal amount of substance.
Security checks took place in a big tent, which you entered after a patdown. People with big equipment had to place it down to be checked by the dogs, while the rest of us had to have our bags checked before we walked through a metal detector. It wasn't exactly a TSA screening (the woman on the other side of the metal detector cheered for everybody as they passed through), but it was enough, I suppose, to hinder someone who wanted to sneak in something illegal.
After the security checkpoint, we were required to scan the barcode on the press pass, which I had never done before. Fortunately, mine flashed green, and it was time to finally enter the stadium. I just had to follow the green line. Or maybe the red one? I don't know, nobody told me. (Nobody working security really knew much beyond their specific duty. That was actually a common theme throughout Super Bowl week in Phoenix. Nobody knew anything.)
12:45-1 p.m.: Here's where the non-glamorous side of this event shows up. Being low on the media totem pole, I didn't have a seat with a view of the field. In fact, I didn't have a seat with a view of anything. My seat was in a media workroom underneath the stands, on field level.
So the Super Bowl would be taking place just a couple of hundred feet away from me, but I'd be watching on television. It's kind of torturous, but that's life in the big city.
Glamorous, it is not.
1-2:30 p.m.: Waiting, waiting and more waiting. It's a long wait for this game to begin. I spent it compiling stats and information, preparing stories for different win/loss scenarios, and double-checking with security that my credential will get me onto the field after the game. (The first five people I asked did not know. Shocker.)
Oh, and of course, some eating commenced. Gotta eat some food.
3 p.m.: We're about 90 minutes from kickoff, and the media workroom is starting to buzz.
4:30 p.m.: It's time for kickoff, but the projector screens are broken. That's nice. I tried alerting some stadium workers of the problem an hour ago, but nobody did anything.
So with the projectors broken, I was forced to watch a 36-inch TV that was about 50 feet away. When people were texting me at this time, asking, "What's your view like for the game??" I responded with this photo:
They were not very impressed.
4:30-5:30 p.m.: The projectors were eventually fixed, making the viewing situation much better. I did my normal game coverage, and you don't need the boring details of that. I did get a little bit of a sneak peek at Katy Perry's halftime show, sort of, when hundreds of people holding glowing orbs lined up in the hallway with about 5 minutes left in the first half.
5:30-8 p.m.: Covering this game was wild. It went so many different ways, there was no way to know how it would end. After Tom Brady was lights out (13-for-15, 120 yards, 2 TDs) in the fourth quarter, it looked like all of the postgame coverage had been written: Brady's fourth ring, third MVP, best all time, yada, yada, yada. But then Jermaine Kearse came down with the Tyree Catch, Part II, and it was just pure shock. There's the old saying that "there's no cheering in the press box," but that rule did not apply for the Super Bowl. Every big play made by Seattle was met with loud whooping and hollering in the media workroom, and after that Kearse catch, seemingly everybody in that room was downright giddy. (I think it's a combination of a lot of Seattle media members rooting for the Seahawks, as well as a number of media members who just hate the Patriots. That's not a misconception; it's a fact.)
I will say, even as a media member, your heart is still racing late in a game like this. You have no idea how the game is going to end, and you remind yourself every so often that you're at the freaking Super Bowl. So you're on the edge of your seat just like everyone else (albeit with a different eye on the game, perhaps), and you can't wait to see what happened next.
And when Kearse made the miracle catch off his hands then knee then hand again and lastly his chest, we finally knew how this was going to end. The Seahawks were going to win the game.
So I updated our live blog and prepared to get in line to get on the field as soon as Marshawn Lynch plunged into the end zone with the game-winning score.
It's important to note that the TVs in our workroom were delayed by about 12 seconds, so any time I heard a big cheer, I could rightfully assume that something was about to go Seattle's way. So as I heard someone going absolutely crazy in the hallway (the TVs there were live), I figured Lynch must have scored. But I looked up and saw that it was a former Patriots player (I'll keep his name out of this, in case that's not something he wants publicized), and I figured "Hmm ... there's no way Seattle's going to pass from the 1-yard line .... right?!"
Sure enough, Russell Wilson passed, Malcolm Butler made the play of the year, and it was instantly known that the Patriots would be champs. I wrote the following in the live blog: "Disaster averted! Malcolm Butler intercepted Wilson at the goal line! The Patriots are going to win!"
I then handed the reins over to Matt Geagan back in Boston, and I hustled to get in line to get onto the field.
8:10-8:30 p.m.: Waiting in line with a bunch of media members to get onto the field.
It was from here that I watched the big fight in the final minute.
On my way to this line, there were a number of friends and families of Seahawks fans who were out in the tunnel. They actually had a front-row view of the aforementioned former Patriots player jumping up and down in celebration after the Butler pick. Yet they were quietly shuffled away, and the friends and families of Patriots players and coaches paraded on by us to get onto the field first. They were all pretty excited, but the Gronkowski family was unsurprisingly the loudest and most boisterous of the bunch.
8:30 p.m.: Finally, it was time to head to the field. To be completely honest, this was just a surreal moment. To go from being tucked away in a little workroom, to stepping out into the center of the biggest moment in sports in the world, it was too much to really comprehend in the moment.
Fortunately, I recorded the moment on video:
Crazy.
After talking with Brandon Browner, Shane Vereen, James Develin and Rob Gronkowski (well, I tried to talk to him, but he's tall and ended up hugging his mother, thereby boxing me out), and after standing in the exact spot where the Seahawks decided to call a passing play ...
I headed back to the workroom to start writing. But I encountered a big hubbub, and curious, I decided to investigate. It turned out to be Tom Brady making his way to the NFL Network set. It was quite the scene.
Brady kept a steel look on his face for that entire walk, ignoring questions and appearing to be pretty steamed. I say it's just Brady's fire, still raging from the game. It was really something to see.
9-9:20 p.m.: On the way to the workroom, I was able to stop and catch Bill Belichick's press conference. His excitement level was about a 1 out of 10. It was not his first rodeo.
I then headed to the room where Patriots players were talking. For a guy who had been walloped by Kam Chancellor and endured a beating, Julian Edelman was remarkably eloquent in all of his postgame comments. He also shed a few tears when talking about how grateful he is for his father.
https://vine.co/v/OtELBYHJzPQ
9:20-9:30 p.m.: There was work to be done, but come on, you're at the Super Bowl. You have to take a couple of pictures on the field, amid the confetti.
9:30-11 p.m.: OK, time to work. Julian Edelman called Trent Dilfer "embarrassing" for the ESPN analyst's early-season eulogy of the Patriots, so I wrote that up very quickly. I gathered some good quotes on the Patriots' mental state during the final minutes of that game, so I wrote that up.
The WBZ crew then signed off air, so it was time to pack up and head out. The night was not over, but my time at the stadium was. I would have preferred to stay there all night on that weird, fake grass (it was spray-painted green, in case you were wondering, and though it was technically real grass, it felt like nothing I've ever stepped on in my life) than to head to do work in a tent outside the team hotel, but that's life.
11 p.m.-2:30 a.m.: It was a long walk back to the car, and a 60-minute drive to Chandler, and I got back to work in our tent set up outside the Patriots' team party. I asked if I could go in and use the restroom in the hotel, but I was turned away at the door. It's tough being a media nerd sometimes.
So I got to work on a Tom Brady feature while the WBZ crew worked on their packages for the morning show. It felt like the game had just ended, but these people had to go live on-air in just a couple of hours. Suffice it to say, there was not much sleep had by anybody who worked it.
But at 2:30 a.m., it was time to pack it up and head to the airport. Our 6 a.m. flight home was still on time, despite the snow back home.
2:30 a.m. to infinity: The journey home was rough. The airport was like a zombie movie at 3 a.m., with bodies strewn about all over the place. It was pretty gross. The place was jammed at 4:45 a.m.:
We got on our flight (we rolled nine deep in our crew) and ended up getting rerouted to Newark, where we had to wait five hours for a train, which took another five hours to get us to Boston. I wrote my Leftover Patriots Thoughts while riding the Amtrak through Connecticut, and when we got back to Boston we had to take a taxi to the station and then shovel a foot of snow off our cars. I actually didn't get home until about 1 a.m., and I hadn't slept a wink the 40 some-odd hours that preceded it.
But you won't hear any complaining from me. A tough travel day is easy to deal with when you just covered perhaps the most exciting Super Bowl in history.
Read more from Michael Hurley by clicking here. You can email him or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.
