What time will Super Bowl 2026 start (and end) tonight?

Super Bowl Sunday is finally here, with the Seattle Seahawks taking on the New England Patriots at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.

While the Eagles won’t be on the field tonight, there will be several former Birds players in the Super Bowl, including Josh Jobe, eccentric Mack Hollins, and Milton Williams, who never wanted to leave Philly.

But all eyes will be on two first-time Super Bowl competitors: Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold and Patriots quarterback Drake Maye.

Also in the spotlight will be NBC’s Mike Tirico, who (as surprising as it sounds) is calling his first Super Bowl after nearly three decades as a play-by-play announcer. During his 25 years at ESPN, the network never broadcast a Super Bowl. When he came over to NBC in 2016, Al Michaels was still the network’s play-by-player, which relegated Tirico to hosting NBC’s studio show.

But after waiting patiently, Tirico became the voice of Sunday Night Football in 2022 and is finally getting his first crack calling a Super Bowl. His goal is to make the lottery ticket experience “feel unique but ordinary.”

“Look, it is a football game. At some point very quickly it’s going to be 2nd and 5, and muscle memory will kick in for all of us,” Tirico said on a conference call this week. “But in the interim, it is a different game.... So take it in, enjoy it, and do it with the people you care most about in the business, and walk away with a great memory.”

Alongside him will be Cris Collinsworth, who is calling his sixth Super Bowl. He was in the booth for Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, the last time the Seahawks faced the Patriots in the big game, which ended with Malcolm Butler’s game-sealing interception at the goal line.

“I can remember the raw emotion of just being in the booth as that play happened and knowing that you were seeing a little piece of history,” Collinsworth said, “knowing that the next words out of your mouth were going to be part of something for the next decade or century or however long that’s going to last.”

Reporting from the sideline will be Melissa Stark and Kaylee Hartung, who will also be working her first Super Bowl. Terry McAulay will also be on hand as the broadcast’s rules analyst.

For those looking to stream the game, head over to Peacock, NBC’s subscription streaming service. The Super Bowl will also stream on all the so-called skinny bundles that carry NBC except one — Fubo, which doesn’t currently have any NBC channels due to an ongoing carriage dispute.

The Eagles’ blowout victory of the Kansas City Chiefs last year in New Orleans clocked in at three hours and 36 minutes, more or less the average Super Bowl duration for the past decade.

It was a welcome pace compared to the previous year, where the Chiefs edged out the San Francisco 49ers in the first-ever Super Bowl game to go into overtime. The nearly five-quarter affair took four hours and six minutes.

The average NFL game typically has 18 commercial breaks, and because of 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 Bad Bunny).

Over the last 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. Philly time.

As with every other Super Bowl, expect to be bombarded with a flurry of ads that cost somewhere between $8 million and $10 million for just 30 seconds. This year, Jason Kelce (no stranger to commercials) will star in a Super Bowl spot for Garage Bear alongside former teammate Beau Allen. Others include Emma Stone hawking Squarespace, George Clooney selling Grubhub, and Raisin Bran’s first-ever Super Bowl ad starring 94-year-old William Shatner ... er, sorry, “Will Shat.”