Las Vegas is a place where time goes to die. The mission of the city's casinos is to drown out the rhythm of your daily life, inundate you with stimuli until your defenses against the craps table or Rich Little Piggies slot machine are useless and you don't realize how much money you're losing. There are no clocks, and nothing closes. A little self-annihilation goes a long way, but thousands of bedraggled tourists in town for Super Bowl 58 will, at some point in linear time, have to make their way to the stadium to watch the Kansas City Chiefs play the San Francisco 49ers.
What time will this game start? That's not for me to say. This running bit, which has befouled the pages of four different websites and is somehow in its ninth installment (thank you to Luis Paez-Pumar for filling in last year), is concerned with matters of a higher order. It's almost quaint to remember its origin now, as the proliferation of streaming services has made it harder to figure out where sports are streaming while creating a niche for scuzzy SEO bait to rake in cheap traffic. This began in 2011, when the Huffington Post went mega-viral by posing the simple question in an article. Since then, digital media has been picked apart and the rise of AI chum is on the horizon. And yet, there is still a short-lived cottage industry built around informing wayward internet users what time the Super Bowl starts, which we will chronicle below. As always, all times Eastern:
- NFL: December 11, 2023, 12:11 p.m.
- USA Today*: December 22, 2023, 6:03 a.m.
- CBS Sports*: January 4, 6:52 p.m.
- Architectural Digest*: January 11, 5:06 a.m.
- Indianapolis Star: January 22, 10:35 a.m.
- Bleacher Report: January 24, 9:00 a.m.
- Bleacher Report: January 28, 11:03 a.m.
- Bleacher Report: January 30, 7:00 a.m.
- Bleacher Report: January 30, 9:00 a.m.
- The Pioneer Woman: February 1, 12:39 p.m.
- Bleacher Report: February 2, 9:00 a.m.
- CBS Sports*: February 2, 9:06 a.m.
- Bleacher Report: February 3, 9:00 a.m.
- People: February 3, 11:00 a.m.
- Bleacher Report: February 4, 8:00 a.m.
- CBS Sports*: February 4, 5:28 p.m.
- Miami Herald: February 5, 10:11 a.m.
- Good Housekeeping: February 5, 4:52 p.m.
- Sporting News: February 5, 5:39 p.m.
- NBC Bay Area: February 5, 5:52 p.m.
- Fox Sports: February 6, 2:21 p.m.
- Bleacher Report: February 7, 9:00 a.m.
- Olympics.com: February 7, 2:21 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 7, 10:23 a.m.
- DAZN: February 7, 10:58 a.m.
- NBC Sports: February 7, 12:49 p.m.
- CBS Sports: February 7, 2:28 p.m.
- NBC Sports: February 7, 4:46 p.m.
- CBS Sports: February 7, 4:45 p.m.
- The Lines: February 8, 3:45 a.m.
- Louisville Courier-Journal: February 8, 4:03 a.m.
- CNET: February 8, 4:58 a.m.
- Los Angeles Times: February 8, 6:23 a.m.
- Yahoo Sports: February 8, 6:45 a.m.
- The Athletic: February 8, 7:45 a.m.
- Yahoo Sports: February 8, 7:52 a.m.
- Paramount+: February 8, 8:00 a.m.
- Architectural Digest: February 8, 8:30 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 8, 9:42 a.m.
- CBS Sports: February 8, 10:30 a.m.
- USA Today: February 8, 1:46 p.m.
CBS Sports, the defending champion, is also a longtime perpetrator of refreshing older articles so they appear to be more recent than they are, with new timestamps and fresher URLs for search engines. I couldn't always get the precise times for cached versions, so there are certainly dozens of refreshed instances left out of this accounting, but I chose precision over volume. The asterisk denotes the earliest result I found. Shout out to Architectural Digest.
