Chiefs vs 49ers: Live Coverage of Super Bowl 2020

How to Watch The game, which is set to begin shortly after 6:30 p.m. Eastern, will be broadcast on Fox and streamed on FoxSports.com and the FoxSports app. Find out more about what to expect here.

Have you seen this trophy?

The Brunswick-Balke-Collender Cup, given to the first pro football champions, is the holy grail of American sports memorabilia. It’s also missing, and has been since almost as soon as it was awarded to the Akron Pros in 1920.

Bill Pennington of The Times spent months trying to track it down. He writes:

It could be in someone’s attic or chock-full of pencils on a schoolkid’s desk.

“At this point, the chances are not very good that anyone will ever find it,” Joe Horrigan, the former longtime executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

It sounded like a challenge.

And so began the mission to solve this whodunit, this where-is-it, a quest that hinged on finding that person who, when shown the only existing, shadowy photo of the trophy, would say: “I’ve seen that. My mother uses it as a doorstop.”

It was a journey that meant knocking on doors, poring over library collections, tracking down interview subjects in 12 states and spending at least one dusty afternoon searching behind the drywall of several abandoned Ohio buildings.

Bill’s article on the search is quite a tale. You’ll love it.

Bieniemy and Saleh: assistant coaches still waiting for a call

The N.F.L. has frequently faced criticism for its inability to elevate people of color to head coaching positions, and the league’s Rooney Rule has often been described as insufficient. Currently there are only four head coaches of color in the league, a list that might have grown longer if two high-profile coordinators had not been so busy coaching this game.

While Eric Bieniemy, the offensive coordinator of the Chiefs, and Robert Saleh, the defensive coordinator of the 49ers, were both mentioned as top candidates for nearly every head coaching vacancy, they were both left standing once all the seats were filled. Of the five jobs that changed hands, only one went to a person of color: Ron Rivera, who is Hispanic, was hired by the Washington Redskins.

With no remaining vacancies, Bieniemy, who is black, and Saleh, who is Arab-American, probably will have to wait another year for their first head-coaching jobs. That has caused mixed feelings for the people they work with.

Coach Andy Reid of the Chiefs said that he is Bieniemy’s biggest fan, and that he already considers his protégé to be a head coach.

“I really don’t think he needs to work on anything to become a head football coach,” Reid said. “I think he’s ready to go. He just needs that opportunity to get in and go.”

John Lynch, the general manager of the 49ers, expressed similar sentiments about Saleh, who won a Super Bowl as a quality control coach with Seattle on his way through the coaching ranks before rising to defensive coordinator with San Francisco in 2017.

“There’s a side of you that is disappointed for a friend,” Lynch said. “There is a side of you that’s like: ‘Yes! We get him for another year!’”

George Kittle and football’s ‘best possible feeling’

George Kittle, the 49ers’ third-year tight end, seems to save his best work for overmatched players in the opposing team’s secondary. And he admits that is by design.

Kittle’s most important play against a defensive back this season came in Week 14, when he dragged his team into range for a winning field goal against the New Orleans Saints despite Marcus Williams, a safety, hanging on for dear life from Kittle’s face mask. But Kittle’s most fun play of the season — at least from his perspective — came during a Week 15 loss to the Atlanta Falcons when he demolished a cornerback on a goal-line run — and was filmed laughing maniacally while rolling around in the end zone.

It was a scoreless game early in the second quarter when the 49ers lined up at Atlanta’s 2-yard line for a running play and Kittle, who stands 6 feet 4 inches and weighs 250 pounds, saw that the only player in front of him was Ricardo Allen, a 5-9, 186-pound cornerback. Kittle said defensive backs often take cheap shots at larger players in the open field, but that this situation gave an enormous advantage to the offensive player.

“I’m in a 3-point stance and I know it’s a run play,” Kittle said, recalling the moment before the snap. “He’s going to get absolutely all of my effort on a run play, and he doesn’t know if it’s a pass or a run and he doesn’t know if he needs to be physical with me.”

Kittle said his laughter was the result of thinking about how much fun it would be to watch film of the play. He described what happened — what’s know as a pancake block — as the “best possible feeling in football.”

As Kittle, a huge fan of professional wrestling and one of the game’s more boisterous characters told Ben Shpigel for a story about the 49ers’ running game: “You take a guy, you drive him backward, you put him on his back and you feel the exhale of his breath and he loses his wind. It’s kind of snatching his soul.”

Tyrann Mathieu embraces his nickname. Sometimes.

The Chiefs’ defense went through a drastic makeover last off-season. Justin Houston left via free agency, Dee Ford was traded to San Francisco, Eric Berry was out of football — yet Kansas City’s defense showed significant improvement.

The biggest reason for the uptick was Tyrann Mathieu, the All-Pro safety known to many fans as the Honey Badger.

Mathieu earned that nickname during his time at Louisiana State for his wild demeanor on and off the field, but this past week he expressed some unease with the persona.

“I feel like I got caught up in that Honey Badger character and it began to consume me,” he said.

A calmer, gentler, more mature Mathieu was all over the field in his first season in Kansas City, piling up 70 tackles, four interceptions and two sacks while being named first-time All-Pro for the second time. His ability to contribute against the run and the pass helped paper over some of his team’s defensive shortcomings.

Coach Andy Reid said Mathieu was everything the team wanted and more, describing the seven-year veteran as a great leader, while acknowledging that the Honey Badger character was not entirely gone.

“We just unlock the cage and let the Badger out on game day,” Reid joked. “He loves playing, man. I mean he brings it every play. He does it in practice. He does it in the game. He’s fun to be around.”

In the zone: Patrick Mahomes, and others, are on the field

A matchup with history, tradition and star power

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Patrick Mahomes, Tyreek Hill, Travis Kelce and Tyrann Mathieu. Jimmy Garoppolo, Raheem Mostert, George Kittle and Nick Bosa. In a Super Bowl that is predicted by oddsmakers to be among the closest in league history, there is no shortage of stars who may reach the next level of fame by leading their team to an N.F.L. championship today.

While the game is not quite the offense versus defense narrative that some have tried to sell — San Francisco actually scored more points than Kansas City this season, and the Chiefs allowed fewer than the 49ers — it is still a fascinating matchup of the 49ers, a team that built itself on a well-balanced attack on both sides of the ball, and the Chiefs, who have tried to find the right complementary pieces to give Mahomes, their star quarterback, the support he needs to realize his sky-high potential.

The story lines in this game are plentiful and have led to a collective shrug about which team is actually the underdog. Officially, the Chiefs are favored by either 1 or 1.5 points, depending on where you look.

Kansas City, which played in two of the first four Super Bowls, is back in the game for the first time since Len Dawson led the Chiefs to a win over the Minnesota Vikings after the 1969 season. The team’s 50-year gap between appearances set a record, and it was largely defined by the franchise’s inability to find a quarterback. The Chiefs used a first-round pick on the game’s most important position only four times in that 50 years, failing badly with Pete Beathard (1964), Steve Fuller (1976) and Todd Blackledge (1983) before finally scoring with Mahomes in 2017.

The 49ers, who built a dynasty with Joe Montana in the 1980s, had it continue seamlessly with Steve Young in the 1990s, and briefly appeared to have found a next-generation quarterback in Colin Kaepernick in the 2010s, appeared in six Super Bowls in those 50 years, winning five of them. And they became something of a quarterback factory for the Chiefs, with Steve DeBerg, Montana, Steve Bono, Elvis Grbac and Alex Smith all starting in San Francisco before ending up in Kansas City.

As ridiculous as that quarterback connection is, it may be trumped by the parallels between the starting left tackles in today’s game. San Francisco’s Joe Staley and Kansas City’s Eric Fisher were both first-round picks out of Central Michigan — the only first-round picks in Chippewa history — and they both went through radical physical and positional transformations in college, gaining 75 pounds or more to get ready to compete at the pro level.

Both teams feature All-Pro tight ends in George Kittle (San Francisco) and Travis Kelce (Kansas City), and both defenses have wildly talented veteran leaders in their secondary in Richard Sherman (San Francisco) and Mathieu.

The places where they differ are quarterback, where Mahomes is a much more explosive player than Garoppolo, and defensive line, where San Francisco’s gaggle of five former first-round picks, led by a dominant rookie in Bosa, is more ferocious than anything Kansas City’s defense can offer.