Super Bowl party props sheet: Taylor Swift, Usher and more (2024)

Two days from now, the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers will meet in Las Vegas' Allegiant Stadium to decide this season's NFL champion.

Kansas City is chasing its third Super Bowl victory in five years. San Francisco seeks its first since 1995.

Follow here for news and live coverage from the week's festivities in the lead-up to the game.

The essentials

Game date and time: Sunday, Feb. 11 at 6:30 p.m. ET

How to watch: CBS, Paramount+ (streaming)

Odds: 49ers -2, Total 47.5 (via BetMGM)

Required reading

• Is 49ers’ Brock Purdy the next Drew Brees? We asked an expert — Brees himself
• Why the Chiefs and 49ers are staying in Lake Las Vegas, not on The Strip
• CBS broadcast crew on Super Bowl LVIII, Taylor Swift and Las Vegas: ‘There is nothing that’s bigger’
• Chiefs vs. 49ers Super Bowl 58 expert picks, odds: Early predictions mostly with Kansas City

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Find the best deals on tickets to see your favorite team.

In what has become an annual tradition here at The Athletic, we have set before you our party prop sheet for Super Bowl LVIII. After having produced this sheet for your consumption the past three years, you may feel like you know what to expect at this point. But you’d be wrong.

This year’s party prop sheet is bigger and better than ever before — Taylor Swift, Las Vegas, more questions, and, most notably, an ability to fill your picks out within this column, have your answers tracked by us and your results sent to you via email when the game is over! The top 10 scores will get a one-year gift subscription to The Athletic on us (the details and terms of that are below).

Before we get to the sheet, let me quickly explain its intended goal. The idea here is to deliver something that is not too complicated and asks the type of questions that can be answered fairly easily even in a crowded room of partygoers — in other words, no props where you have to count the number of times an announcer says a certain word, or how many times something about a player is mentioned, etc. And we make sure to incorporate the pomp and circ*mstance around the game — did I mention Taylor Swift? — to better appease the football agnostics of the group. As I always say, the Super Bowl tends to bring out the one-timers, just like church on Christmas — of course, we can’t ignore that this whole spectacle is still about crowning this NFL season’s champion, so there’s plenty of questions about the game itself.

With that said, here is our prop sheet for Super Bowl LVIII, some that I’ve made up or re-shaped from real props, some that were the inspiration of our editorial director (and party prop sheet kindred spirit) Oskar Garcia, along with some commentary along the way to help add context. If you want to use it for your own Super Bowl plans, we’re again offering a PDF that you can download and print out (or email to friends and family to play along with). But if you want to take things to the next level, we encourage you to give the online Q&A form (another hat tip to Oskar!) a try.

See the full party props sheet here.

The Kansas City Chiefs defense has to have an overarching philosophy against the San Francisco 49ers in Sunday’s Super Bowl: We are going to stop the run, and if Brock Purdy and his weapons can beat our defensive backs, by far the best part of our defense, we can live with it.

The Chiefs, as good as their defense has been, have been susceptible to the run, in particular zone runs, in which the 49ers specialize. It won’t be as simple as loading the box. To stop San Francisco’s rushing attack, Kansas City will need a masterpiece from defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, a game plan reminiscent of Bill Belichick’s against Sean McVay’s Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LIII, in which the New England Patriots held the explosive Rams offense to just 3 points.

The Chiefs don’t have to shut down the 49ers to that degree, but this is a much better and more complete offense than that Jared Goff-led Rams unit. San Francisco majors in outside zone but can gash you with gap scheme, and Purdy can beat you with the dropback passing game and second-reaction plays. There is a world in which the 49ers control the ball on the ground, eat up the clock and keep putting up points. The Chiefs cannot let that happen. In the regular season, the 49ers led the league in yards per carry on zone runs. The Chiefs were 31st in yards per carry against zone runs.

The Chiefs struggled against zone runs because they like to have light bodies on the field to match up when they blitz and they simply don’t have a lot of sturdy defensive tackles. Also, they thrive on creating negative plays with a lot of movement pre- and post-snap to cause confusion, but good zone-running teams can just sort through the chaos by staying on their zone tracks.

For Spagnuolo to put together his masterpiece, he could very well borrow from Belichick’s Super Bowl LIII defensive game plan. The Patriots primarily lined up in a 6-1 front with a soft zone behind it to take away the Rams’ outside zone game and explosive play-action shot plays. The 2019 Patriots defense shares a lot of similarities with the 2023 Chiefs defense. They’re elite pass defenses that major in man coverage but can be soft against the run. The 6-1 clogged up running lanes while relying on the secondary to keep a lid on the offense. Again, this 49ers offense is much more complete, so the Chiefs can’t lean into the 6-1 front as frequently as the Patriots did, but I suspect it’ll be a major component of their early-downs game plan.

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If you placed the regular-season production of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy side by side and covered their names, Joe Fan would assume Mahomes possessed the league-leading rates while Purdy fought his way into being a top-10 quarterback. Not so.

But then came the postseason.

Though it hasn’t been without its flaws, Mahomes in the postseason began waving his finger like Dikembe Mutombo saying, “No, no, no!” (Or, if you prefer, like Newman from “Seinfeld” — Wayne Knight — as the scheming scientist in Jurassic Park saying, “Ah, ah, ah!”) It was Purdy, then, who’s become the quarterback scuffling to keep his team alive.

In my final metric-based quarterback outlook of the 2023 season, I’ll dive into the regular-season and postseason numbers for the Super Bowl LVIII passers in several situations, using these rates (via TruMedia):

• Expected points added (EPA) per dropback
• Passer rating
• Total QB EPA
• Offensive team EPA per play

I’ll also dive into which pass routes Mahomes and Purdy have succeeded at, or struggled with, during the regular season and postseason.

Continue reading.

The San Francisco 49ers will continue practicing at UNLV ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl LVIII even as coach Kyle Shanahan acknowledged Wednesday the field conditions aren’t what he and his team would prefer.

“We’re here. We’re practicing on it,” Shanahan said at his media availability following the team’s first full practice in Las Vegas. “Everyone has their preferences. I wish things were better, but we’ll deal with the field how it is.”

Shanahan noted the 49ers would have had to change their entire schedule to make it work at a different field. The 49ers had been weighing their options, including seeking arrangements to use the Las Vegas Raiders practice facility at a time opposite the Kansas City Chiefs, after testing the field out at a walk-through on Monday.

“We’d have to go too early in the morning, mess everything up,” he said. “This is the best choice we’ve got.”

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Monday the league had 23 experts and the NFL Players Association visit UNLV’s field and “all of them think it’s a very playable surface.” The NFLPA pushed back on that assertion Wednesday.

NFLPA president J.C. Tretter, speaking at a news conference Wednesday, said it learned the practice field’s sod was installed incorrectly, but league officials deemed the surface “playable.” UNLV has a pair of artificial surface fields that last week were overlaid with natural grass. But because there was no surface placed between the artificial field and the new sod, league sources told The Athletic, the fields had a sponge-like feel.

“That’s a problem,” Tretter said. “Also, leading to Roger’s press conference on Monday, they said ‘It’s OK because the field’s playable.’ When we talked about it last week, we said we need to raise the level to make both surfaces high quality and then a week later you’re saying, ‘It’s OK because it’s playable.’ Playable is not the same standard as high quality. That’s about as low as you can go to say it’s OK. So we can’t kind of talk out of both sides of our mouth to say injury data looks like this. We want high-quality fields. That’s OK because it’s playable. That’s not what we do. We want high-quality surfaces for our players to play on and practice on. I don’t think we have that.”

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LAS VEGAS — NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell spoke about pro football players wanting to steer the NFL toward concessions on gambling and playing surfaces, in his state of the league news conference Wednesday leading up to Super Bowl LVIII. Players on both sides of the ball would also like to see NFL officials scrap talk about making the hip-drop tackle an illegal tackle and a punishable offense.

Howell, the new executive director, and executive committee members J.C. Tretter, Atlanta Falcons defensive end Calais Campbell, free agent safety Michael Thomas, Jacksonville Jaguars kicker Brandon McManus and Los Angeles Chargers running back Austin Ekeler provided insight on these issues, on which union leaders and league officials continue to engage in discussions.

The hope is the two sides can reach a place of understanding that will 1) Do away with what the players view as unreasonable punishment and fine systems while also giving them greater freedom — particularly when it comes to legalized sports betting; and 2) Convince owners to ensure safer working conditions, most notably when it comes to playing surfaces.

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HENDERSON, Nev. — The most underrated player for the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday might be the guy who tries to channel the energy of a hyena.

Although back in the summer of 2022, cornerback Deommodore Lenoir wasn’t showing enough energy. Or enough hyena. Which is why Kyle Shanahan singled him out during a team meeting during training camp.

Lenoir’s recollection of what Shanahan said in front of 90 or so teammates: “You’ve got the dog mentality in you. When are you going to start showing it?”

Ouch. Lenoir said Shanahan didn’t like Lenoir’s lackadaisical pursuit during a broken play in practice, and he remembers it as an agonizing moment.

He’d played at a small high school just east of downtown Los Angeles that made scrappiness its calling card and took on the hyena as an unofficial mascot. Lenoir liked the imagery, too, not only because hyenas are, in his words, “sneaky-quick” but because adopting one as a symbol was so unique. Who embraces a scavenger? Lenoir even said that if the 49ers win on Sunday, he’ll get a tattoo on his right shoulder of a hyena holding the Lombardi Trophy.

Which is to say, he’d prided himself on his tenacity and hustle, and now the head coach was questioning those very qualities. In front of the entire team.

Lenoir may have even been in denial when Shanahan called his name because at first he didn’t think he was talking about him. Shanahan had used his nickname, “Demo,” and Lenoir thought he heard “Deebo,” as in receiver Deebo Samuel, who happened to be sitting right in front of him. Lenoir said he kept waiting for Samuel to stand up and take a tongue lashing from the coach. Instead there was awkward silence until Samuel eventually piped up.

“He turned around and was like, ‘Say something!’” Lenoir said. “I was not even able to talk. I was surprised. I ain’t ever been called out in a team meeting before — not at Oregon, not even in high school.”

He said that’s when he began a steady rise. He wasn’t even a starter at the beginning of the season and still was considered a neophyte, and a weak link in the secondary, when the 2022 playoffs began. But that’s when he truly started to flash his fangs. Lenoir had big interceptions in wins over the Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Cowboys, and was so steady down the homestretch that his starting role to begin the 2023 campaign never was in doubt.

Continue reading here.

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is rewriting history. After leading the Chiefs to a win at top-seeded Baltimore in the AFC title game, Mahomes is heading to his fourth Super Bowl in the last five seasons and vying for his third title. Mahomes has done this all by the age of 28, just a year older than Brady was when he won his third title with the New England Patriots.

This time, Mahomes plays the protagonist against a familiar foe — the San Francisco 49ers — setting up a rematch of Super Bowl LIV. The Chiefs may be small underdogs in Super Bowl LVIII on BetMGM, but that doesn’t mean Vegas is predicting anything less than excellence from the two-time league and Super Bowl MVP. Considering his history and this latest playoff run, I’m bullish on the Mahomes Super Bowl prop bets.

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A timeout taken by the opponent gave them more time than usual, more time to discuss one of their most significant snaps of the season.

Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback, walked to the sideline to chat with coach Andy Reid and offensive coordinator Matt Nagy. Within a few seconds, Mahomes was joined in the mini-huddle by his skill-position teammates. The situation, a third-and-9 play just before the two-minute warning of the AFC Championship Game against the Baltimore Ravens, was distilled into one question: Should the Chiefs, leading by 7 points, run the ball to ensure the next play comes after the two-minute warning or should they select a passing play to gain a first down and seal a trip to Super Bowl LVIII?

“Pat was like, ‘Put the ball in my hands,’” receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling said.

Reid obliged. After the Chiefs lined up with three receivers on the left side and with the Ravens hinting at man coverage, Mahomes identified two passing options.

“I looked at (rookie receiver) Rashee (Rice) first and the safety cut him (off) and gave MVS the free lane and I just put it up and let him make a play,” Mahomes said. “He did that. He made a heck of a great catch.”

Valdes-Scantling, who lined up in the slot, ran what many coaches describe as a “for the love of the game route,” a slight diagonal seam through the middle of the defense, one designed to attract the opponent’s deepest safety, a route to create more space for a teammate who can catch the ball on an intermediate pass.

For Mahomes though, Valdes-Scantling ran his route so well that he sprinted past cornerback Arthur Maulet. Mahomes threw a perfect pass, too, leading to Valdes-Scantling’s biggest highlight of a season: a 32-yard catch, securing the ball with both hands while he fell backward onto the turf.

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LAS VEGAS — Lisa McCaffrey is nervous as Super Bowl LVIII approaches on Sunday.

“I’m trying to stay calm,” she said over coffee Monday in a hotel lobby on The Strip. “I’m trying to stay busy. I’m trying not to think about it until opening kickoff.”

It’s a familiar feeling for McCaffrey. Her husband, Ed McCaffrey, won three titles as a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers and Denver Broncos. And now her son, Christian McCaffrey, is set to play a central role when the 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs for all the marbles Sunday.

“I’m probably even more nervous this time because it’s one of my kids,” she said. “But I definitely was stressed out back then, too.”

That past was immortalized in magazine form 25 years ago, right after Ed McCaffrey won his final Super Bowl with the Broncos in January 1999.

Denver had beaten the Atlanta Falcons. That’s when a 2 1/2-year-old Christian McCaffrey, wearing Ed’s No. 87 jersey that was far too big for him, sprinted across layers of confetti on the field in Miami to produce an image that Sports Illustrated would feature as one of its full-spread lead photos.

Her husband had won another championship, so that stress was gone. But Lisa suddenly faced another worry as her young son was weaving in and out of traffic on a busy post-Super Bowl football field.

“I think I lost Christian at one point,” she said. “I remember being exasperated.”

The future NFL star was already a prodigious runner then.

“He started walking around seven months, which was unusually early,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “I know that sounds bizarre, you can not believe me — but I swear that’s the truth. Ask his pediatrician. He was doing things his mind was not ready to do. It was like, ‘Please, don’t hang on the chandelier.’

“Christian’s brain was moving at a normal rate, but his body was moving faster.”

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NFLPA executive committee members were asked about removing the hip-drop tackle and both defensive and offensive players said it was silly and would compromise the integrity of the game even further to take that tackle, which is “just a football play,” out of the game. It's a non-issue to players.

An NFLPA survey revealed that 92 percent of players prefer to play on grass versus turf. The NFLPA continues to stress this to NFL and owners and wants to find a solution, which union leaders believe is reasonable, especially considering MetLife Stadium will put down grass for the World Cup.

49ers beat writer Matt Barrows stops by the show on radio row at Super Bowl LVIII to talk about the unlikely path the Niners took to reach the big dance, and why we might not ever see a success story like this in the NFL.

Watch the conversation here.

Guessing the color Gatorade that gets tossed on the Super Bowl-winning head coach is a tradition at this point. And it's one of many only-in-the-Super-Bowl prop bets.

It's among the top 10 bets for the Super Bowl, according to BetMGM. And so far, 27 percent of the bets placed have been on orange Gatorade for Sunday's game.

Purple remains a slight favorite, though orange's odds have shifted from +550 to +325 because of all the activity.

Full odds:

• Purple: +275
• Orange: +325
• Blue: +375
• Yellow/Green/Lime: +375
• Red/Pink: +400
• Clear/Water: +1100
• No Gatorade bath: +2000

In spring 2010, Washington’s new offensive coaching staff met for the first time. Coordinator Kyle Shanahan was leading a conversation about blocking the back side of a run play when tight ends coach Jon Embree offered up a suggestion.

Embree had worked for head coach Mike Shanahan, Kyle’s father, with the Denver Broncos 10 years earlier. Kyle liked Embree’s approach. He agreed with the suggestion, and the group moved on to the next play. Not 30 seconds later, the door to the room flew open. “No, no, no, no, no — nuh-uh,” Mike Shanahan said, according to Embree. “I don’t want to do it that way. And here’s why …”

“All the coaches were like, ‘Where did he come from?” Embree said.

Mike came from his office. He knew he didn’t like the blocking variation, intervening at the moment to fix the error before the staff wasted any more time, because he’d watched and listened to the entire discussion on a live feed from the meeting room that was playing out on screens in his office.

The elder Shanahan set up his facilities this way since his head coaching tenure with the Broncos, which included two Super Bowl victories. Kyle has taken a lot from his dad’s career and applied it to his own, including watching over his players and coaches from a perch high atop the organization. As Kyle prepares to coach his San Francisco 49ers in their second Super Bowl in five years, the surveillance state is just as much a part of the Shanahan tree as the outside zone run game.

It might not seem like an ideal workplace setup, but the majority of players and coaches interviewed for this story didn’t find the cameras intrusive. For current Niners and former Shanahan guys, this is just part of the job. Many said they assume they are being recorded and listened to at all times.

“I mean, you already know (Kyle) watches,” San Francisco left tackle Trent Williams said, laughing. “It’s like being on ‘Big Brother.'” Williams started his career under Mike Shanahan in Washington in 2010, so he’s used to this level of oversight. “I did some dumb rookie mistake and (Mike) busted in the room as soon as that play came on the screen afterward,” he said.

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Taylor Swift has already logged plenty of miles traveling the world on her record-breaking Eras Tour, and she could soon add over 5,500 more on a one-way trip.

That’s assuming the pop star makes the journey from the stage in Tokyo, where she’ll be performing on Saturday, to Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas to watch boyfriend Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs play in the Super Bowl the following day.

It’s fair to figure Swift will try to attend, considering she’s been a regular presence at Kelce’s games since the two debuted their relationship in the fall. But the travel schedule to catch the season finale will be a grind.

With a nighttime show to close four days in Japan, Swift will have to hustle to get across the Pacific Ocean and back to the states in time for kickoff.

So, can she make it?

In short, yes. The 17-hour time difference works in her favor and means Swift could get to Las Vegas with plenty of time to spare.

But there are considerations, such as weather patterns and the crowded Las Vegas airports on Super Bowl weekend, that could factor in.

Here’s how it might work.