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This Is So Stupid

What Time Does “What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?” Start?

A bunch of clocks on a wall.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Many questions will be answered this Super Bowl Sunday: Will the city of Philadelphia burn down if the Eagles win? Will the city of Philadelphia burn down if the Eagles lose? Can Andy Reid beat his old team? Are Kansas City fans going to bring their racist chant to Arizona?

The most important question of all, though, is asked before the game even begins, by millions of people with access to the internet: What time does the Super Bowl start? I get it; you have to time your chicken wings and your dips and your desserts to finish before kickoff, so you don't miss a quick touchdown while burning your hand on a hot baking sheet. This is important information to have. While you could simply google the question and get your answer at the top of the screen, many publications bank on people to scroll past that very quickly and, instead, click on articles that declare, quite definitively, what time the Super Bowl starts.

Patrick Redford, the usual caretaker of this list, is currently on vacation in New Zealand, so I'm filling in. I wish I were the one in New Zealand, and not the one digging through the back-end of these articles to find out the publishing times. Maybe next year.

As always, all times Eastern:

As with last year, several publications published multiple attempts to rake in that sweet SEO. CBS Sports was once again the biggest culprit of posting the same article with different URLs multiple times; congratulations to them.

Finally, since this yearly feature is all about radical transparency, I would be remiss if I didn't answer the most pressing question of all: What time does "What time does 'What time does the Super Bowl start?' start?" start? The answer would be Jan. 30 at 12:18 p.m., when Patrick messaged me to see if I could sub in for him.

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