What time will Super Bowl 2021 start (and end) tonight?

Super Bowl Sunday is finally here, with the Kansas City Chiefs taking on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla.

It will air on CBS, with broadcasters Jim Nantz and Tony Romo calling the game for the second time in three years. Romo was underwhelming calling his first Super Bowl for CBS in 2019, but in all fairness he didn’t have much to work with in the New England Patriots’ boring 13-3 victory over the Los Angeles Rams.

This year, Romo knows the stakes are higher, with future Hall of Famer Tom Brady and superstar Patrick Mahomes facing off in a quarterback showdown for the ages (in Brady’s case, age 43).

“I really think this game is a legacy game,” Romo said on a Super Bowl conference call with CBS Sports. “This is going to be one of the great matchups in sports history. This is what you talk about with your friends. Could you imagine if Michael Jordan got his team to the finals against LeBron — who is becoming the face of the league? We’re getting that in this Super Bowl. It’s like Jack Nicklaus against Tiger Woods. There’s nothing else I could find.”

CBS landed the game after swapping spots on the Super Bowl rotation with NBC, which will pair the 2022 Super Bowl with the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. NBC’s last Super Bowl broadcast was the Eagles’ 2018 victory over the New England Patriots, in which analyst Cris Collinsworth annoyed and then made up with Philadelphia fans.

One obvious difference with tonight’s game is that Raymond James Stadium will be just a third full, with 25,000 fans scattered throughout the stands due to the coronavirus pandemic. Of those fans, 7,500 are vaccinated health-care workers attending the game for free. On the plus side, the lack of fans in the stands means CBS can use some different camera angles and locations to capture the game.

The average NFL game typically has about 16 commercial breaks, and due to all the untimed stoppages in play, games don’t really have a set “end time.” The Super Bowl is even tougher to predict, thanks to all those expensive commercials and a full-blown concert at halftime (headlined this year by The Weeknd).

So what time will Chiefs-Buccaneers actually end?

The Chiefs’ victory over the San Francisco 49ers last year in Super Bowl LIV was a quick affair, ending at 10:10 p.m. Eastern, a brisk three hours and 30 minutes. The 2019 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams was also quick, lasting just three hours and 35 minutes.

By comparison, the Eagles’ 41-33 win over the Patriots in Super Bowl LII in 2018 went on until 10:25 p.m., lasting just under four hours.

Since 2010, the longest Super Bowl remains Super Bowl XLVII in 2013 between the 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens, which lasted four hours and 15 minutes due to a 34-minute blackout in the Superdome in New Orleans.

Over the past 10 seasons, the average length of the Super Bowl is about three hours and 39 minutes. Using that measure, the game would end around 10:09 p.m. ET.

FiveThirtyEight studied NFL games during the 2020 season to find that just 18 minutes of a typical three-hour broadcast involved game action. The numbers get more out of whack during the Super Bowl, where more than a quarter of an average broadcast is advertisements.

But when a Philly gem like Four Seasons Total Landscaping is featured in a Super Bowl commercial, can we really complain?

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