A Guide to the Super Bowl

Nothing brings together more Americans — not awards shows, not television series finales, not even presidential debates — than the Super Bowl.

Will this year’s game, between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, be the most watched ever? By one measure — the total number of people watching — it seems likely to be. Last year’s game set the record, with 115 million viewers in the U.S., and it did not have Taylor Swift.

Swift’s expected presence at the game, to cheer on her boyfriend, the Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce, has the potential to help it break the 1982 record for the highest proportion of Americans who watched: 49 percent.

In the rest of today’s newsletter, we’ll tell you what you need to know about this year’s Super Bowl; the teams, the strange bets, the halftime show and more.

The teams

Kansas City Chiefs: If you’re someone who watches football only on Super Bowl Sunday, it may seem unremarkable that the Chiefs are playing today. They’ve reached the Super Bowl in four of the past five seasons. Yet this season was not a great one for the Chiefs. They lost six games, the most they have since Patrick Mahomes took over as starting quarterback. Their offense struggled with turnovers and dropped passes. Kelce’s performances seemed to falter even as his celebrity grew; he failed to score a touchdown in the final six games of the regular season.

Since the playoffs began, though, the team has looked more like the Chiefs of old. Kelce has scored three touchdowns in the past two games. And the defense has been excellent all season.