Inside the super-slick Super Bowl 50 stadium

Face it, you’ll have to take out a second mortgage if you want to score feloniously expensive tickets to Super Bowl 50 next weekend at Levi’s Stadium.

May I suggest a more frugal alternative, something that’ll set you back only 50 bucks or so?

Take the Levi’s Stadium “Super Bowl 50” tour, a 90-minute romp from the bowels of the stadium, where the locker rooms are housed and a vast refrigerated cache of beer is stored, to the roof, where an environmentally lauded solar terrace and native garden dwells, and everywhere in between.

The tours are on hiatus until Feb. 28; when they resume, you’ll be taking the tour while the stadium is empty – but that is better than actually attending a Super Bowl. I’ve been to several in my misspent youth as a sportswriter and, to be honest, the experience is bombastic, over-the-top, saturated with fake excitement and fat-cat NFL insiders in the seats. Basically, it’s kind of a hassle all around.

And, if you take the tour, you can impress your friends with salient info nuggets about this high-tech edifice.

Things such as:

▪ This gridiron is “grid-neutral,” meaning the solar panels pump out 500,000 kilowatt hours of energy, enough to power every San Francisco 49ers home game, though perhaps not enough to power the team’s sputtering offense. (Sorry, too tempting to take a cheap shot.)

▪ There is free Wi-Fi with 12,000 access points, meaning a seat holder won’t be duking it out for high-speed access with the drunken dude behind him trying to upload a selfie to his Instagram account.

▪ You can buy food from stadium vendors remotely, say, from your living room, and have it delivered to the seat of someone actually attending the game, provided you know that person’s cellphone and seat number.

▪ To gain entrance to the home locker room, equipped with such luxuries as an underwater treadmill and a personal barber shop, you must pass through a fingerprint scanner.

▪ Unless you’re on Forbes’ list of richest Americans, don’t even think of reserving one of Levi’s ultra-plush suites for the big game. Word is, you’ll have to lay down low six figures even for the small suites up high. If you have to ask the price to gain access to the club suites on the field level, where all food and adult beverages are included, then your name’s not Warren Buffett.

Actually, the tour is a fun way to see the stadium from the inside out without the hue and cry of the crowds. Less than two years old, it still has that new-stadium smell (despite the 49ers’ best efforts to stink up the joint most Sundays).

If you can swing it, get Kevin Lang as your tour guide. He’s just the kind of young-ish, hip-ish, tech-savvy-ish guy Levi’s Stadium wants to attract. For sure, he toes the company line and spouts the many splendors of the structure and its multifarious innovations. But he leavens it with a sly sense of humor, and he even made a few jokes at the 49ers’ expense.

Another positive: The tour is not solely catered to the hardcore football fan. Architecture buffs, the tech-obsessed and climate-change tree-huggers will find much to like.

Lang: “See those white boxes pointing down at us (from an awning near 40-yard-line seats)? Don’t worry. They aren’t radioactive. They aren’t X-rays. These are cellphone signal boosters (serving) all four major carriers. What’s another amenity people expect these days when they come to an event? There is Wi-Fi Internet, provided by Comcast Infinity. Hop on our network, no password needed.”

At times, Lang put on the hard sell, as when he talked about Levi’s Stadium app, which includes a “way-finder function” so that you don’t need ushers to find your seat. In fact, you rarely have to leave your seat or take your eyes off your screen because there are replays available of most plays. All that’s missing is outsourcing cheering to Mumbai and maybe the addition of built-in, high-tech commodes at your seat.

Following Lang’s gee-whiz, high-tech spiel through the various stadium levels, I got the impression that the game itself is something of an afterthought. It’s telling that a decent number of seats in the suites, which can run up to $20,000 per game (for 20 people), depending on the opponent, face away from the field toward a wet bar and a flat-screen monitor. Which raises the question of why you’d bother to come to the stadium simply to watch the TV feed.

Still, the suites are sweet cribs, each with a kitchen much nicer than at your (or, at least, my) house.

This story was originally published January 24, 2016 at 7:01 PM with the headline "Inside the super-slick Super Bowl 50 stadium."