How long is the 2018 Super Bowl? We hope you stocked up on chips and guac

The Super Bowl is an American holiday. Whether you actually are invested in the sport or are just watching it with friends because it’s a thing, Super Bowl Sunday is actually pretty great. It’s an excuse to hang out, eat, drink, and scream at people on a television screen all day — what more could you ask for!? As much as we enjoy the festivities associated with the 2018 Super Bowl, it’s also kinda nice to know how long the festivities will go on.

Not because we want them to end earlier or anything. But you need to strategically plan your snacking schedule, and space out your crappy beer drinking schedule accordingly. This is a serious sporting event, people! How long is the Super Bowl? We shall tell you.

For your edification: the average Super Bowl run-time is between three and four hours, all told.

But this year’s Super Bowl is meant to end around 10 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Pacific, so they’re aiming for about four hours (the game starts at 5 p.m. EST, 3 p.m. PST). What’s crazy to think about is the fact that the actual football game is only an hour long (and out of that hour, on average there’s only, like, eleven minutes of active game play). So that’s an additional two hours of content, between the epic half time show, all the pre-game festivities, and of course the commercials, which, let’s be honest, are arguably the best part of the Super Bowl anyway.

So if you’re trying to put a clock on your festivities (for snacking purposes), now you know.