Staying focused amid madness of Super Bowl buildup is job No. 1

As soon as the Patriots and Giants left their locker rooms last Sunday with the conference championship trophies in hand, the madness of the Super Bowl was upon them. And so began the challenge for team execs and the head coaches to remind their players, coaches and staff of what's ahead.

The good news for both Super Bowl teams is their leaders know the drill of the two weeks leading up to the big game. For the three-time champion Patriots, it's their fifth trip in the last 10 years and owner Robert Kraft, head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady (two-time MVP) have been there for all five. For the Giants, the ownership duo of John Mara and Steve Tisch, head coach Tom Coughlin and game MVP Eli Manning were all there when they beat the Patriots 17-14 in Super Bowl XLII four years ago (and Mara has been with the team for their five Super Bowls).

This Super Bowl experience is of great help with the critical challenge of making sure your team avoids pitfall No. 1 -- not being able to navigate the inevitable distractions uniquely associated with this game.

Belichick, Coughlin and the team leaders want everyone focused on the goal of winning the Lombardi Trophy. So they are preaching to the players to get all of their personal business handled as soon as possible before actual Super Bowl week commences Monday in Indianapolis. For players, coaches and staff, their phones, text messages and emails have been going non-stop with requests from family, friends and long-lost acquaintances for game tickets, hotel rooms, party tickets, dinner reservations, airfare deals, you name it.

I speak from experience. My teams went to two Super Bowls during my NFL front office career -- 1977 with the Vikings in Pasadena and 2000 with the Titans in Atlanta. The experiences were a mix of joy to be there, sorrow to unfortunately lose both times but memorable and frenetic in activity.

I was a rookie PR man with that Vikings team making its fourth Super Bowl appearance in eight years. Coach Bud Grant, quarterback Fran Tarkenton and the Purple People Eaters on defense led the veteran-laden team.

Yet with all that Super Bowl experience, I saw a bunch of players who couldn't get out of the ticket business during the two weeks leading up to the game. In those days, player salaries were nowhere near today's levels, so picking up an extra several thousand dollars by re-selling -- yes scalping -- part of their ticket allotment meant significant money for the players. I'm not saying that's the reason we lost to the Raiders 32-14 (QB Kenny Stabler and receiver/MVP Fred Biletnikoff had a lot more to do with the loss). But the distractions of the ticket business didn't help.

I learned from that experience so when I returned to the Super Bowl as president of the Titans 23 years later, I impressed upon our team the importance of minimizing the distractions and staying focused on the game. Adding to the difficulty in 2000 was the fact there was only one week between the AFC Championship and the Super Bowl as opposed to two weeks in most years. As a staff, we had to prepare at the start of the playoffs for a Super Bowl trip, however unlikely that seemed as a wild-card team.

On the Thursday before the AFC title game in Jacksonville, I held a meeting with our players, coaches and staff and their spouses/significant others to go over our plans if we beat the Jaguars. We laid out the allocation of Super Bowl tickets (15 per player and coach), hotel rooms (two apiece and we'd try to help on additional needs), info about the family plane to Atlanta the Thursday of Super Bowl week and family activities in Atlanta. We gave them the basic schedule for Super Bowl week. We encouraged the wives and girlfriends to immediately get to work on the tickets and travel details for family and friends -- while the players focused on the AFC title game at hand -- so that come Sunday night, they would be have their lists ready if needed.

It seemed like sacrilege to be talking about plans for a Super Bowl when you weren't in the game yet but we had no choice. Fortunately, our coach -- Jeff Fisher -- understood the tight timetable. Everything fell in place once we beat the Jaguars on Sunday. We had our stadium celebration upon arrival back in Nashville (50,000 attended on a cold January night) and then bussed directly to our facility, where we passed out detailed books with the pertinent Super Bowl info and collected the players' room and family plane requests. The team was on a plane to Atlanta the next day.