Super Bowl LII: Eagles coach’s halftime strategy

Adjusting to the longer halftime break of Super Bowl is crucial to the tactics of Philadelphia Eagles coach Doug Pederson.

Philadelphia Eagles' head coach Doug Pederson

Philadelphia Eagles coach Doug Pederson was dressed as if he was disappearing up to Big Lake for a couple of days of fishing and camping.

Wearing regular blue jeans and an unremarkable rain jacket despite the chance of inclement weather being negligible inside the Mall of America, Pederson did not come across as an especially meticulous sort of soul … until he revealed his attention to detail ahead of Super Bowl LII had included getting his players to practise the halftime break.

We kid you not. Halftime has been treated like a passage of play to be perfected against the New England Patriots, but the Eagles might have bigger and better things to worry about after Tom Brady’s wingman, the 1.98m, 120kg, lightning quick Rob Gronkowski was cleared of concussion protocols. “I officially got the word today that I was cleared,” said the Patriots’ towering tight end. “I’m ready to roll.”

Still, you can only control the controllables, as Australian cricketers like to say, and Pederson decided the extended halftime break needed to be managed. The Eagles halted a training session at the University of Minnesota at 3pm and filed off the field under Pederson’s command, occupying an almost silent dressing room for the next 30 minutes. In normal NFL fixtures, the halftime goes for 15 minutes without a Justin Timberlake performance. For the Super Bowl, it’s 30 minutes with Timberlake thrown in.

Pederson gave his players the full half-hour break at practice before they came out and trained tardily in the second half of their contact session.

“I just think it’s important that the guys get it in their minds how much time that is at halftime,” Pederson said.

“We’re normally working on a 13, 14-minute halftime (in the locker room) and now it’s twice as long, the guys’ bodies are going to close down. So I wanted to make sure they understand that we have to go in and stay focused, but at the same time we can refuel and recharge.”

Pederson was unconcerned by the Eagles’ imperfect session. “Number one, it’s been a couple of days since we’ve been on the practice field. It’s typical you’re going to have not quite as crisp of a practice,” he said. “For me, it was just going around and talking to the leadership guys.

“It wasn’t about getting the team together, getting the coaches together and then browbeating everybody. We’re so late in the season now that we understand how to practice. Why I did the break, obviously it was to put us in that situation and now we understand it. It was a very teachable moment for our guys, how to prepare for the second half of a football game.”

Pederson is a rough-and-ready yet warm-hearted character who’s been known to finish team meetings by saying, “Let’s watch this video and then I’ll treat you to some ice-cream.” A fridge in the Eagles’ team room at Lincoln Field is packed with it. “I just love ice cream,” Pederson said somewhat comically yesterday while patting his ample stomach. “Can’t you tell? It was just something I kind of came up with. Just a saying. Just a phrase. We do serve ice cream as our snack the night before the game. I love ice cream, and I don’t want to stay in that team meeting too long because it’s over there, melting. So I just throw it out there. Let’s watch the video and have some ice cream. There’s nothing else really behind it. I just want the ice cream.”