This is how MetLife Stadium will transition from a Jets game to a Giants game in 10 hours

The Jets and Giants will open their preseason schedules at MetLife Stadium this weekend, but for the hundreds who will work the high-speed turnaround switching the building from green to blue in the span of less than 10 overnight hours between the contests, this is their Super Bowl.

And many of them helped the stadium stage an actual Super Bowl.

“We’re really proud of what we can do in achieving these kinds of things,” Steve Sansonese, vice president of facility operations and events at MetLife, told Newsday. “This is a challenge for us and we really like taking these on. We’ve always come through before and we’ll have to perform this weekend just like we have done many times in the past.”

It already has been a hectic summer in East Rutherford, one that has included eight FIFA World Cup matches (including the final on July 19) and a number of concerts in the three-plus weeks since soccer moved out (including a Guns N’ Roses show on Wednesday night).

“We’ve had a lot thrown at us here,” Sansonese said. “But we’re in the biggest market in the United States, so it’s expected that this kind of stuff will be here. That’s our job: First and foremost make sure the teams have the building they want and they are ready for their game, and second to host other events here.”

Now comes the most challenging weekend of all.

The Jets’ game against the Buccaneers will begin at 7 p.m. Friday and should end at about 10:30. The Giants’ game against the Vikings will kick off at 1 p.m. on Saturday, with the parking lots opening at 8 and the gates opening at 11.

That leaves a very small window for the end zones to be scrubbed and repainted, nearly all of the signs in the building from the Rings of Honor to the banners that hang from the lampposts to be swapped, and the seats and parking lots (including the port-a-johns out there) to be cleaned up in time for the building to look its best for the Saturday crowd.

“Everybody needs to feel like they are at a Giants game rather than a Jets game and there aren’t any remnants from the night before,” Sansonese said.

There also are the contents of eight broadcast booths to be shuffled in and out in a choreographed loading dock ballet — because it is a preseason game, each team has its own local television and radio crew working — and four locker rooms to be appointed.

That last part is one of the concessions the Giants have to make to the congested logistics of this weekend. Normally they would have their locker room set up the night before a 1 p.m. game, but on Friday, the Buccaneers will be using some of their space as the visiting team against the Jets. The Giants won’t be able to start putting their players’ pads and uniforms in place until about 5 a.m. on Saturday.

“It doesn’t matter when we move into our locker room, we’ll be ready to go,” Giants director of equipment operations Tim Slaman told Newsday.

For a team that has spent the last two weeks traveling to and from West Virginia and currently has its day-to-day locker room in a tent in a parking lot while construction is underway at its regular facility, it’s a relatively small pothole to leap over.

“As our old coach Bill Parcells said many times: ‘It is what it is,’ ” Slaman said. “We have a great staff at MetLife to execute the changeover. We’re focused on our team and doing everything for them to be at their best. Every player. They are competing for jobs, and our job is to put them in the best position to succeed.”

Sansonese said he intends to have most of his daunting to-do list completed by 7 a.m.

That would be faster than just about any turnaround attempted in the 16-year history of the two teams sharing ownership of the building.

There have been recent weekends when the Giants and Jets played on back-to-back days, but those starts typically have been at least 24 hours apart. One team might have played at 1, 4, or 8 on a Sunday while the other had a Monday night contest. That’s how the 2023 regular season opened; the Giants were blown out by the Cowboys on a Sunday night and Aaron Rodgers’ Achilles tendon was blown out on Monday night.

A day game after a night game is a lot different. So much so that it’s been attempted only twice before in MetLife’s history, just once with both the Giants and Jets involved, and not for nearly a decade.

In September 2014, Notre Dame played Syracuse on a Saturday night and the Jets hosted the Lions the following day. At least for that enterprise, the stadium could be partially set up for the Jets while the college game took place.

In December 2016, however, the Jets played a Saturday night game against the Dolphins and the Giants played the Lions the next afternoon. Such a spin move hasn’t been attempted since.

Sansonese was on vacation with his family at Disney World in the spring when he received a call from MetLife Stadium CEO Ron VanDeVeen asking if they would be able to handle that rare task for this year’s preseason.

“I said, ‘Yeah, we‘ll plan for it, we’ll get it done,’ ” Sansonese said. “I’ve always made my deadlines.”

He’s confident he’ll hit this one, too, especially because the biggest variable in any assignment like this — the weather — seems as if it will not be a factor. Still, just in case, there will be tents, tarps and even fast-curing turf paint on hand if the skies change their mind at any point.

And Sansonese obviously won’t be doing it himself. He said there will be a crew of 12 split into three different groups scrubbing and painting the turf, another 14 handling the signage and lower bowl coverings, eight working on the locker rooms and 20 changing the parking lot decor.

That doesn’t include the 150 or so who literally sweep and mop every row in the stands, nor does it count the folks who will make sure all of the concession booths are selling Malik Nabers jerseys to Giants fans and Garrett Wilson jerseys to Jets fans.

There also are managers and directors who oversee every one of those aspects.

They will be working in staggered shifts, too, so no single person will have to stay awake through the entire process.

“It couldn’t be done without them,” Sansonese said of the staff. “They’re the ones who are on the ground in the individual areas to make sure this all gets done. I’ll operate it from a macro level, but it’s really the guys on the ground who I am most proud of.”

At some point on Saturday afternoon shortly before John Harbaugh coaches his first game for the Giants, Sansonese said he will be on the field and look around at the ideally completed work he and his crew performed. He does that before just about every game played at MetLife Stadium, but this one will mean a lot more because of the cramped timeline. Then he intends to go to his office and take a deep breath.

“By that time, once the game starts, I really don’t have any business being out there unless there is an emergency,” he said. “At 1 o’clock on Saturday, if I am still doing my job, that means something didn’t work out.”

He paused for a moment and added:

“So let’s hope that I am not.”

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.