TAMPA, Fla. — Here and nationally, this Super Bowl week — which culminates with today’s game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals — is as much about setting the right economic tone as it is about scoring touchdowns.

“I think we’ve been very cognizant of the fact that our resources are limited and that everyone’s resources are limited,” Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio said in a news conference that kicked off the week. “We are going to put on a first-class Super Bowl in the most frugal way that we possibly can, and that’s been our approach.”

In a Super Bowl study released in mid-January, auditing company PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that personal and business spending cutbacks will result in “fewer visitors and media, a shorter average stay per visitor, and less spending in the hospitality and related areas.”

The company projects $150 million in direct spending tied to Super Bowl weekend, 22.3 percent less than when the 2008 game was in held Glendale, Ariz.

In the days leading to the game, there were still hotel rooms available in Tampa and the surrounding areas, although most required a minimum stay of three or four nights. Among the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, there are roughly 46,000 rooms of lodging, ranging from large hotels to bed-and-breakfast inns.

The Super Bowl is still America’s biggest annual sports extravaganza, one that the National Football League expects to draw a coast-to-coast television audience of 140 million viewers.

Even so, some Super Bowl experts say revelers haven’t seen the worst of it, and that next year’s game in Miami could be affected to an even greater degree because the recent economic plunge happened when party plans were already in place.