Every year, the internet celebrates the Super Bowl in the trolliest way imaginable: by mocking/emulating the Huffington Post's infamous "What Time Does The Superbowl Start" SEO-baiting headline from 2011. If you're like us, then you long for a world in which every website could somehow just reprint that post every year. Thankfully, that is exactly the kind of world we live in. Below, our crack team of SEO scientists have compiled a list of the nine best Super Bowl time-seeking headlines of 2013.
Just to back things up for a moment: as Deadspin previously summarized, the Huffington Post post existed "for the sole purpose of garnering internet search traffic from the thousands of people Googling 'what time does the superbowl start?'" And because it garnered so many hits in such a blatant, whorey manner, everyone has been doing their best to copy it the past two years. That includes us too (although at least we tweaked the formula in different ways)! Without further adieu, here are this year's best imitators and homages.
- WHAT TIME IS SUPER BOWL 47?—Ever since they caught on to the Huffington Post's shenanigans, NFL.com has become the king daddy Super Bowl time keeper with a page specially dedicated to the start time. It obviously works, since it's the first Google search result.
- What time is the Super Bowl?—This LA Times headline is the Barnett Newman of Super Bowl headlines.
- What Time Does the Super Bowl Start?—TV Guide comes closes to the classic Huffington Post style, although they make the classic mistake of spelling "Super Bowl" correctly.
- What Time Is Super Bowl Kick-Off?—Patch tweaks the Huffington Post style ever so slightly with "Kick-Off," which was also the title of a movie about gay soccer players.
- What Time Is The Super Bowl?: 2013's Game Start Time And More About Big Event—How far the mighty have fallen: it seems as though Huffington Post has just given up completely at this point. But it's not like anyone expects Duncan Sheik to come out with another "Barely Breathing"—perfection can't be topped.
- What Time Does The 2013 Super Bowl Start? Kickoff Time, Pregame Coverage, Plus TV Details—International Business Times makes the same mistake as the one above, cluttering up a perfectly good headline with lots of extra words.
- What time is the Super Bowl?: Answers to your questions about the big game—Yahoo doesn't even bother capitalizing their headline. It's as if they don't even care.
- How "What Time Is the Super Bowl?" Explains the Future of Internet Search—Slate gets all smarmy in their headline-within-a-headline headline all about the science of headlining.
- The “What Time Is The Super Bowl” SEO-Whoring Is Especially Sad This Year—As always, Deadspin has their finger on the pulse of Super Bowl headlining.
We'd be remiss in not mentioning that this website exists: http://whattimedoesthesuperbowlstart.com. Hilariously, it lists the start time incorrectly, because it's a perfect thing.
No doubt, there'll be more of these headlines tomorrow morning (we know we have something in store!). And in case you were still wondering what time it starts: 6:30 p.m. EST. Now as for the tougher question of what time it ends... our best guess? It's probably occurring simultaneously to our writing about it now, as Eternalism and the B-theory of time might suggest. Therefore, it's already over and never over, all at once. You're welcome.
