Super Bowl 2020 LIVE: Kansas City Chiefs vs San Francisco 49ers latest from Miami tonight

Sheryll Thomas of Bates City, Missouri, had one of the best deals possible for the Super Bowl: Free tickets.

She won her pair in a drawing at a 5k walk at Arrowhead Stadium in early October. So she knew for weeks she’d be inside Hard Rock Stadium for this game.

Then her favorite team, the Chiefs, won the AFC championship to earn Kansas City’s first Super Bowl trip since 1970. She and her husband, Jack, arrived at the stadium decked out in Chiefs’ jerseys and turned down lots of money for the opportunity to walk inside the Hard Rock Stadium.

“It’s been overwhelming,” Sheryll Thomas said. “I’ve had so many people offer to buy them. I was offered $10,000 a while ago in the parking lot.”

Now the Thomases have one more wish.

“The only thing that’s going to make it better is to take home a win,” Sheryll Thomas said.

StubHub said the average ticket price was $6,513 hours before kickoff, 53% higher than a year ago when the Super Bowl was in Atlanta. Getting inside the gates cost $5,270.

Tony Leogrande of Fontana, California, also got his tickets for free. The Detroit fan and his wife have traveled to every home and away game since 2013, and the Lions rewarded Leogrande with a pair of tickets to the Super Bowl at their final home game. His wife didn’t come to the Super Bowl, leaving Leogrande a spare ticket. He found Mike Bray, a Niners’ fan from Pennsylvania.

“I’ve been looking for tickets for months and months and months and flew down here without a ticket,” Bray said.

“Walked on, asked a thousand people, ‘Who’s got a ticket? Who’s got a ticket?’ Someone said, ‘Find the Lions’ guy.’ Not a lot of Lions’ fans. … Got a ticket. It worked out great. I paid $4,000, which is fair to me, and it works out great. So I’m thrilled to be here.”

Leogrande chimed in: “He knows more about me than my wife does already.”

Bray has lots of company. StubHub says Pennsylvania, Nebraska and New Jersey were among the states with the highest jump in ticket sales over the past two days with Pennsylvania ticket sales jumping 118% in that time.

 

On football’s biggest day, they took time to remember a basketball legend.

The Chiefs and 49ers finished their warmups before the Super Bowl and lined up at their respective 24-yard lines – a tribute to Kobe Bryant, the five-time NBA champion who died along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26.

Bryant wore No. 24 in his final 10 seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers.

San Francisco’s Richard Sherman showed up for the Super Bowl in a Bryant jersey and appeared on Fox’s pregame show to read a poem called “Dear Football.” It largely copied “Dear Basketball,” the poem Bryant wrote in 2015 to announce that he was playing his final season.

Sherman ended his poem with “We love you, Kobe. We love you, Gianna. Love always, Richard.”

 

After playing in the Super Bowl nine times in the past 18 years, the Patriots will miss the party this year, and pretty much everyone outside of New England is delighted.

From their grumpy head coach Bill Belichick, to the well documented allegations of bending the rules — Google ‘spygate’ and ‘deflategate’ for more — the team has become reviled in most of the country.

Of course, part of the reason the Patriots became so disliked was because they were so good, but dynasties end sooner or later, and with Brady to turn 43 this year, and his future uncertain, New England might be in for a few cold winters.

That will be celebrated by many on a balmy Miami night.

4 – Speaking of which, is this the start of the Mahomes era?

At 24, Mahomes, in his second full season as a starter, is on his way to becoming one of the league’s great quarterbacks.

The son of a former Major League Baseball pitcher, Mahomes was blessed with impeccable genes and a model example of what it took to reach the top.

No matter where he is on the field, he has an uncanny ability to make pretty much any throw.

Telegenic and articulate, Mahomes is ready to take over the mantle from 42-year-old Tom Brady as the face of the NFL.

A Super Bowl ring would speed up the process.

In a fragmented and rapidly-changing media industry, the NFL remains a gold mine to traditional network television, the only sport that can still pull in a massive live audience weekly.

Ratings in the regular season were up for the second straight year, with NFL games accounting for no fewer than 47 of the 50 top-rated programmes.

The Super Bowl remains the most watched program in the U.S. year in and out. But that doesn’t mean it is immune from cultural trends.

Last year’s showdown had the lowest audience in a decade, though it still lured in 98 million viewers to a low-scoring affair.

Though his year’s game features one of the league’s smallest-market teams in the Chiefs, the presence of electrifying quarterback Patrick Mahomes should more than make up for that.

2 – Will Kyle Shanahan atone for his role in Atlanta Falcons debacle?

Kyle Shanahan was offensive co-ordinator for a Falcons team on the wrong side of an historic collapse in the Super Bowl three years ago.

He was criticised for his play-calling after the Falcons, having established a huge lead over the New England Patriots, continued their passing game instead of going with a safer running game.

Perhaps the most costly decision came with eight minutes left on a 3rd&1 — meaning the Falcons had to gain only one more yard to earn another first down — when Atlanta opted for a risky pass play.

But quarterback Matt Ryan was caught as he cocked his arm to throw, the ball fell loose, the Patriots got it back trailing by 16 points and the rest is history.

In an ironic twist, Shanahan was named 49ers head coach the next day and now presides over a team that has been questioned for running the ball too much.

1 – Will Andy Reid will earn redemption for previous questionable Super Bowl clock management?

Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid is seeking redemption in Sunday’s Super Bowl, even if he is reluctant to admit it.

Reid guided the Philadelphia Eagles to the Super Bowl in 2005, but he was widely accused of mismanaging the clock in a 24-21 defeat by the New England Patriots, the equivalent of one field goal.

Down by 10 points with less than six minutes left, the Eagles got the ball back, needing a minimum of two scores.

If time was of an essence, you wouldn’t have known it from the way Philadelphia ate up nearly four minutes on a 13-play, 79-yard drive before finally scoring a touchdown.

It was too little too late, and Reid took the brunt of the blame for the way it unfolded.

Of course, clock management is an inexact science and all coaches have been second-guessed at one time or another, but make no mistake Reid will be under the microscope on Sunday.

Chiefs

QB Chad Henne

RB LeSean McCoy

OL Jackson Barton

OL Andrew Wylie

LB Darron Lee

CB Morris Claiborne

OL Ryan Hunter

Niners

WR Dante Pettis

WR Jordan Matthews

QB C.J. Beathard

DL Kevin Givens

CB Dontae Johnson

LB Azeez Al-Shaair

TE Daniel Helm

The winner of Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers is of little concern to Las Vegas casinos, with a sizeable jackpot awaiting them so long as it is a low-scoring and uneventful affair.

While the bulk of bets will not be made until closer to kickoff, the current pattern is not expected to change which means it will be a balanced game for bookmakers with most tickets backing the Chiefs but bigger wagers on the 49ers.

“When it’s all said and done I don’t think it’s really going to matter who wins the game,” Jay Kornegay, executive vice president of race and sports operations at Westgate SuperBook, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

What likely will determine how much the casinos make off the biggest U.S. sporting event of the year is whether the combined score, or the over/under, of two of the NFL’s most potent offenses, is greater or less than 54.5.

Considering the Chiefs boast one of the best quarterbacks in Patrick Mahomes while 49ers running back Raheem Mostert is coming off a four-touchdown performance, a repeat of last year’s record low-scoring Super Bowl seems unlikely.

“We will need the under as typical betting patterns are showing up and people are playing the over,” said Kornegay. “In fact about 83% of all the tickets on the total (score) have been on the over and we expect that to continue into the weekend.”

Kornegay also said proposition bets, like deciding whether an interception will be returned for a touchdown or if there will be a two-point conversion, account for about 65% of the Westgate Superbook handle.

With such a large amount dedicated to proposition bets, Kornegay said casinos would be better served if the game does not produce much in the way of wacky plays but is more of a straightforward affair.

“We don’t want a dull game like we saw last year,” said Kornegay, referring to the New England Patriots’ 13-3 win over the Los Angeles Rams.

“We just don’t want a lot of craziness happening during the course of the game because whenever those types of things happen I can guarantee you that we are losing money.”

Sports bettors wagered $145.9 million in Nevada on last year’s Super Bowl, which was 8% below the record $158.6 million wagered on the 2018 NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Patriots, who have played in four of the last five Super Bowls.

Kornegay feels all the ingredients are firmly in place for Nevada casinos to accept a record handle, or the total amount of bets placed.

“We’ve got a marquee matchup, two really loyal fanbases and nobody has Patriots fatigue,” said Kornegay.

“Plus the economy is very strong, which always reflects on the Super Bowl handle, so you have some very positive factors going into this game that all point to another record handle on the Super Bowl.”

It seems like only yesterday that Patrick Mahomes came into our lives, yet after two whirlwind seasons, the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback stands on the precipice of immortality. The 24-year-old son of former MLB pitcher Pat Mahomes patiently observed from a distance as a backup throughout his first year after being drafted in 2017. But it has not taken Mahomes long to repay the Chiefs for the haul they gave up to climp to No 10 and snag the cornerstone of their franchise for the next decade or more.

The San Francisco 49ers and their polished, complete roster, led by the ingenious coaching of Kyle Shanahan, stand in his way on Sunday. But victory for Mahomes might see him inherit the aura of inevitable victory on the big stage that the New England Patriots had and perhaps lost for good after crashing out of the play-offs during Wild Card weekend. After four near-flawless post-season games (10 touchdowns and no interceptions), it needed the greatest sporting dynasty of all time in Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, as well as a controversial overtime rule to deny him him last year.

Despite backing up his scintillating MVP season with fireworks at times in the regular season (namely the 278 yards and four touchdowns in the 2nd quarter against the Raiders), Mahomes briefly disappeared for three weeks after dislocating his patella. But despite an unprecedented MVP season of his own from Lamar Jackson with the Ravens, Mahomes soon reminded us in the last few months that he is still very much the guy in this league. Not that the Chiefs needed any more evidence as they plan to make Mahomes the first quarterback in history to earn $200 million (£153 million) over five years. It’s a “priority”, according to Chiefs chairman and CEO Clark Hunt, and will happen “in the next 12 to 15 months”.