The Super Bowl Experience, which had something of a “test run” last week along Tampa’s Hillsborough River, reopens the days before and after next Sunday’s NFL championship – with some slight alterations and explanations.
The huge Super Bowl LV signs, in and around Raymond James Stadium and so prevalent throughout Tampa, are being removed because, it turns out, they weren’t put up to signify the Roman numeral 55. Rather, they were paid for by former Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Jon Gruden to subliminally promote Las Vegas as a future Super Bowl site since the Raiders he now coaches have relocated there from Oakland.
The phone booth in the Buccaneers’ original bright orange color has been dismantled because the vast number of football fans under the age of 40 have no idea what a phone booth is. Worse, many European visitors were mistaking it for a pissoir.
In the new “Breakaway Sprint” field, visitors who fancy themselves as speedsters will get the opportunity to pull away from an animatronic Carlton Davis in a 50-yard race.
In an adjoining exhibit, crying towels can be purchased by fans of the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, Jacksonville Jaguars and Houston Texans, teams still awaiting their first Super Bowl appearance.
Anheuser-Busch, which for the first time in 37 years is not running Super Bowl commercials, had planned a Budweiser exhibit. It was canceled when one of the Clydesdales displayed symptoms of Potomac Horse Fever after attending a MAGA rally.
Fans can have themselves photographed next to the Vince Lombardi Trophy. But the opportunity to have themselves photographed next to Vince Lombardi fell through when the snowstorm blanketing the northeast forced cancellation of plans to transport him to Tampa from Mount Olivet Cemetery in Middletown, N.J.
Len Dawson, the Most Valuable Player after quarterbacking the Kansas City Chiefs to their 23-7 victory over Minnesota in the fourth AFL-NFL World Championship Game (later renamed Super Bowl IV), may visit the exhibition, but the host Buccaneers have paid Steve Young and Doug Williams to stay home. They won Super Bowl MVP honors with San Francisco and Washington, respectively, after the Bucs let them get away. Another former Buccaneers quarterback, Trent Dilfer, also won a Super Bowl but no one remembers how or why because Baltimore’s defense actually did it.
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