Here’s What Time You Can Expect The Super Bowl To End

After 23 weeks of losses and victories, football fans have finally arrived at the most important Sunday of the year: Super Bowl LVI. The big game will feature the Los Angeles Rams facing off against the Cincinnati Bengals from SoFi Stadium in Ingelwood, California. It all kicks off at 6:30 p.m. ET, but exactly how much of your night should you be setting aside to watch men in tights run around the field? That’s a trickier question to answer.

The average NFL game runs roughly between three and three and a half hours. However, the Super Bowl is obviously not your average game. It’s got all the pomp and circumstance of the Oscars — except with a couple more concussions — including lots of buzzy, celebrity-filled commercials and a halftime performance featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar.

According to NBC’s official broadcasting schedule, the game is supposed to be finished by 10:45 p.m ET. But anyone who’s ever been to or watched a sporting event knows that the predicted end time isn’t a guarantee. An NFL game consists of four 15 minute quarters, all of which include stoppages. But expect for this Sundays’ game to have even more breaks than usual. There are all of the aforementioned ads, plus the halftime show, which will last between 20 to 30 minutes according to Rolling Stone.

However, this timetable could go straight out the window if the game goes into overtime. In the NFL, overtime means another 10 minute period if both teams are still tied up at the end of the fourth quarter. Being that the biggest game of the year can’t end in a tie, it’s possible that, were the game to go to overtime, viewers could see period after period of extra time until a victor is crowned. That’s pretty unlikely, though. There have been 55 Super Bowls played in the history of the NFL, and only one has ever gone to overtime. It happened for the first time in 2017 when the New England Patriots bested the Atlanta Falcons.

All told, viewers should expect the game to last about four hours, ending sometime between 10:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m ET. Just don’t expect everything to go exactly according to schedule.