What time will Super Bowl 2022 start (and end) tonight?

Super Bowl Sunday is finally here, with the Los Angeles Rams taking on the Cincinnati Bengals at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif.

About 100 million people will tune in to watch the game, which will air this year on NBC, with Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth in the booth. A former Bengals receiver, Collinsworth was on the fieldfor Cincinnati’s two previous Super Bowl appearances in 1982 and 1989, which both resulted in losses to Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers.

“I’m obviously excited. I’m human. I can’t help myself. It’s going to be fun,” Collinsworth said earlier this week. “I would have bought a ticket regardless to go watch this game. I just happened to get the best seat in the house and sit next to my partner, and what could be better.”

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Meanwhile, this will be the 11th Super Bowl called by Michaels, tying him with the late Pat Summerall as the most in NFL broadcasting history. It will also likely be his last game as NBC’s top NFL announcer. Next season, the network plans to pair Collinsworth with Mike Tirico, who is currently anchoring their Winter Olympics coverage and will handle NBC’s pregame coverage of the Super Bowl alongside former ESPNer Maria Taylor.

NBC landed this year’s game after swapping spots on the Super Bowl rotation with CBS, allowing it to pair the 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, where Collinsworth annoyed and later made up with Philadelphia fans.

For the first time in two years, the stadium will be full of fans as the omicron wave of COVID-19 subsides. Fans will be required to wear masks and must show proof of vaccination or a negative test.

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 hip-hop legends Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar).

So what time will Rams-Bengals actually end?

The last three Super Bowls have been relatively brisk, lasting around three hours and 30 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 14 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 38 minutes. Using that measure, the game would end around 10:08 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.

Tonight, expect to be bombarded with a flurry of ads for cryptocurrency and sports betting that cost somewhere between $6 million to $7 million for just 30 seconds (though there will be at least one controversial ad that involves lightning).

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