Of the many differences between the Super Bowl and the regular season, or even your garden-variety playoff game, the biggest may be the extended halftime. Usually, the intermission is 12 minutes. On Sunday, when the Eagles face the Patriots in Super Bowl LII, it will be extended to 30 minutes to facilitate the halftime show (featuring Justin Timberlake!).
The pregame schedule will be longer too; typically, there's about 20 minutes between pregame warmups and kickoff; at the Super Bowl it's doubled to 40 minutes. Put another way: There will be a lot of down time.
Certainly, the Patriots, making their eighth Super Bowl appearance this century, are familiar with this. For the Eagles, who haven't been to a Super Bowl since 2004, this is a new experience but one they will be prepared for.
How?
By standing around, naturally.
"It is a long time, pregame and halftime,'' Eagles coach Doug Pederson said Wednesday, via Philly.com's Paul Domowitch. "I've begun conversations with our players preparing them for it.''
This preparation included a mock halftime at Wednesday's practice.
"We've done a lot of research on when exactly we can get (back) out (on the field),'' special teams coordinator Dave Fipp explained. "There's a lot of dynamics to the thing. Pregame ceremonies. Festivities. Halftime stuff. But we've kind of laid all that stuff out. [Wednesday], at practice, we're going to kind of go through a mock halftime situation deal. We're going to stop, go in the locker room, do what we do on game day and then come back out. So that should be good.''
To give the Eagles the best chance to win, maybe they should also practice hoisting the Lombardi Trophy too.
We're kidding though at this point in the proceedings nothing would surprise us.
