Super Bowl LVI
Super Bowl LVI will be the 56th Super Bowl and the 52nd modern-era National Football League (NFL) championship. The game will decide the champion of the National Football League (NFL) for the 2021 NFL season. The game is scheduled to be played on February 6, 2022, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California (with the exact date pending potential changes to the NFL calendar).[1][2] It will be the eighth Super Bowl hosted by the Greater Los Angeles Area, with the last one being Super Bowl XXVII in 1993, held at the Rose Bowl, and the first in the city of Inglewood. The game will be televised nationally by NBC.
 SoFi Stadium | |
| Date | February 6, 2022 |
|---|---|
| Stadium | SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, California |
| TV in the United States | |
| Network | NBC |
| Announcers | Al Michaels (play-by-play) Cris Collinsworth (analyst) Michele Tafoya (sideline reporter) Terry McAulay (rules analyst) |
| Radio in the United States | |
| Network | Westwood One |
| Announcers | Kevin Harlan (play-by-play) Kurt Warner (color commentator) Laura Okmin and Tony Boselli (sideline reporters) |
Host selection
In contrast to previous Super Bowl bidding processes, no bids were accepted for Super Bowl LVI. The bids for Super Bowl LIII, Super Bowl LIV and Super Bowl LV were all drawn from the same pool of candidates in a meeting on May 24, 2016. Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, and Tampa Bay were the four candidates for the three contests; Atlanta received Super Bowl LIII, Miami received Super Bowl LIV, and Los Angeles (who declined to bid on Super Bowl LIV and was not eligible for Super Bowl LIII) was granted Super Bowl LV.
On May 18, 2017, authorities announced that the stadium opening, originally scheduled for the start of the 2019 season, had been delayed an additional year to 2020. At the league's owners meetings in Chicago on May 23, 2017, the league re-awarded Super Bowl LV to the lone remaining candidate, Tampa Bay, and awarded Super Bowl LVI to Los Angeles.[3]
Under the Collective Bargaining Agreement signed by the league and the National Football League Players Association in March 2020, the 2021 regular season is the first one to be eligible to be expanded from 16 to 17 games. If the season is expanded, Super Bowl LVI could be moved to the following week, February 13, 2022.[2]
Broadcasting
Under the NFL's current television contracts, Super Bowl LVI was to have been broadcast by CBS, as part of the annual cycle among the three main broadcast television partners of the NFL. For the first time, the Super Bowl is tentatively scheduled on a date that falls with an ongoing Olympic Games, as the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing will begin on February 4, the Friday prior to the game. Fellow NFL broadcaster NBC holds the broadcast rights to the Olympics, and primetime coverage of the Games on that night, if any, would have had to compete with the Super Bowl—potentially diluting viewership and advertising revenue for both events.[4][5] To maximize U.S. viewership and provide value to NBC's rights (NBC paid $7.75 billion to the IOC to air the Olympics through 2032),[6] marquee events in recent Games (such as swimming and figure skating) have sometimes been deliberately scheduled to allow live broadcasts in North American primetime hours whenever feasible.[7][8] There is also an unsaid gentleman's agreement between the NFL's broadcasters to not air competing original programming against the Super Bowl.[9]
On March 13, 2019, CBS announced that it had agreed to trade Super Bowl LVI with NBC in exchange for Super Bowl LV, thus both Super Bowl LVI and the 2022 Winter Olympics will be televised by NBC. As with Super Bowl LII, which fell prior to the 2018 Winter Olympics, NBC will be able to maximize its advertising revenue by encouraging sponsors to buy time for both events; the network estimated it would take in a combined $1.4 billion from advertising sales for the two events in 2018.[10] CBS will also be able to follow up its Super Bowl with another high-profile sporting event it will broadcast in 2021, the NCAA Final Four, to which the network holds the rights only in odd-numbered years. This led critics to suggest that the NFL had become willing to break the traditional Super Bowl rotation if it can be used to bolster other major sporting events a network airs afterwards.[11][4][5]
References
- La Canfora, Jason (November 17, 2019). "How 17-game season would work in proposed CBA with vote expected after the 2019 season". cbssports.com. Retrieved November 17, 2019.
- Schad, Tom (March 15, 2020). "Here are the six biggest changes in the NFL's new collective bargaining agreement". USA Today. Archived from the original on March 16, 2020. Retrieved March 15, 2020.
- "Super Bowl LV relocated to Tampa; L.A. will host SB LVI". NFL.com. Retrieved May 23, 2017.
- "CBS, NBC in 'Freaky Friday' Super Bowl swap". adage.com. March 13, 2019. Retrieved March 13, 2019.
- Steinberg, Brian (March 13, 2019). "CBS, NBC to Swap Super Bowl Broadcasts". Variety. Retrieved March 13, 2019.
- "Olympics on NBC through 2032". USA Today. Gannett Company. May 7, 2014.
- "Tokyo 2020 swimming finals set for prime-time in United States as agreement reached to hold morning medal races". insidethegames.biz. Archived from the original on September 24, 2018. Retrieved September 24, 2018.
- Longman, Jeré (February 12, 2018). "For Olympic Figure Skaters, a New Meaning to Morning Routine". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 17, 2018.
- "Goal of spectacle colors NFL's thinking about Super Bowl halftime show". Chicago Tribune. February 6, 2011. Retrieved January 30, 2013.
- Lynch, Jason (January 28, 2018). "NBC Sports Is About to Make $1.4 Billion in 22 Days Thanks to the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics". Adweek. Retrieved March 14, 2019.
- "CBS agrees to Super Bowl swap to give NBC Winter Olympics boost". SportsPro. Retrieved March 14, 2019.