Well well well. Well WELL well! My sources tell me it's a big weekend for the Bay Area, in the sense that luminaries such as Bad Bunny, Tom Brady, and Kalyn Kahler have descended upon San Francisco to be within an hour's drive of the Super Bowl, which will be held in Santa Clara next to an electrical substation so big, it got a kooky guy to write a blog post about how its electromagnetism was weakening the load-bearing tissues of various 49ers players; the theory espoused in said blog post is now influential enough that it's been covered by The Athletic (former employer of Kalyn Kahler), ESPN (current employer of Kalyn Kahler), and NBC News (no known affiliation with Kalyn Kahler, but I wouldn't rule it out). I didn't know electricity could do stuff like that, but as a lifelong PG&E customer, I also wouldn't rule out some volto-thaumaturgy on their part.
Perhaps you have some questions. What? would be a good one, Why? another, though as experienced readers of this semi-proud, always annual, often-strained column know, we are concerned with a different interrogative: When? The Super Bowl's geographic fixity is far above our pay grade, but its temporal situation less so. As always, the start of the game is less important to us than the start of the real game, which is the brutal scrabble among the decreasing number of search traffic–focused websites to inform their readers what time the game starts. If you google any form of that question, you will see a big box right below the search bar telling you exactly what time it starts (that is, unless you see the Gemini logo immediately preceding Google's proprietary AI cheerily telling you Super Bowl 60 is scheduled to take place on April 6, 1841). Yet the game persists.
Several websites, most notably CBS Sports, will refresh the timestamps of a handful of identical posts, making it difficult to track with great precision. What follows is as faithful an attempt as I can make. All times Eastern; time stamps are as accurate as I could find from the source code.
- NBC: February 4, 11:21 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 5, 11:10 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 5, 11:18 a.m.
- Cincinnati Enquirer: February 5, 12:35 p.m.
- CBS Sports: February 5, 12:58 p.m.
- Yahoo Sports: February 5, 2:06 p.m.
- Yahoo Sports: February 5, 4:25 p.m.
- Al Jazeera: February 6, 2:29 a.m.
- ESPN: February 6, 6:35 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 6, 8:53 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 6, 8:56 am.
- El Paso Times*: February 6, 9:38 a.m.
- NFL.com: February 6, 9:45 a.m.
- Montgomery Advertiser: February 6, 10:29 a.m.
- NBC Bay Area: February 6, 1:38 p.m.
- Athlon Sports: February 6, 2:11 p.m.
- CBS Sports: February 6, 3:05 p.m.
- Forbes: February 6, 3:53 p.m.
* Their amazing headline: "Who is playing Super Bowl 2026? When is halftime? Questions answered"
