Feb 8, 2026 - News
Our top Super Bowl week takeaways
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Levi's Stadium on Super Bowl Sunday. Photo: Shawna Chen/Axios
The Bay Area was elevated to the national stage this past week as festivities for America's biggest sporting event overtook our streets.
The big picture: As your eyes and ears on the ground, here are some of our top non-football takeaways from Super Bowl LX.
🎉 We know how to turn up.
- Hundreds of people danced to Bad Bunny tracks at the Downtown First Thursdays block party, while Tacolicious' Bad Bunny lookalike contest drew crowds to the Mission.
- Celebrity sightings were plentiful, fueled by hundreds of private planes that landed in Bay Area airports throughout the week (including Beyonce and Jay Z's luxury jet!).
- Cardi B made a surprise appearance at a Don Julio event, Pharrell was photographed at the Chinese restaurant San Tung and Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce sang along to fiancée Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" at a Sports Illustrated party attended by dozens of other A-listers.
🚉 So-so transportation.
- BART, Muni, Caltrain and the VTA all saw ridership boosts, but traveling across the Bay Area wasn't as seamless as some expected.
- Because there's no direct transit line between San Francisco and Levi's Stadium, many people had to carve out more than an hour for the journey and switch transit agencies at least once.
- Fans who chose to drive on game day were spotted jumping out of cars and walking along the highway with traffic backed up as early as 11:30am. (This journalist did the same along the Great America Parkway.)
📢 Politics and sports.
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was on many people's minds amid an influx of federal agents for Super Bowl security.
- Homegrown band Green Day called out ICE agents at a private concert Friday, telling them to quit their jobs and "come on this side of the line." (They decided to play it safer at the pre-game show.)
- Bad Bunny fans sporting frog heads handed out "F--k ICE" stickers at Dolores Park on Saturday, while activists distributed more than 25,000 "ICE OUT" towels to Super Bowl attendees outside the stadium on game day.
🏟️ The devil is in the details.
- Behind-the-scenes tours gave us a glimpse of the amount of prep involved — from nurturing grass for the field and training medical workers for game day emergencies to organizing 6,000 media credentials and coordinating security across local, state, federal and private personnel.
- Though Mayor Daniel Lurie's office didn't say whether the city escalated homeless encampment sweeps, downtown streets certainly looked different amid the increased police presence.
- San Francisco funded additional shelter beds specifically during Super Bowl week, but local advocates still worry unhoused residents were simply pushed to other neighborhoods.
👋 So much for the doom loop narrative.
- Pleasant surprise seemed to be the sentiment among visitors.
- We saw people jumping on photo ops, queuing up around the corner for a taste of La Taqueria and taking in cityscape views aboard cable cars.
- "I may have been too harsh on San Francisco," Jake Malasek of Barstool Sports, a site that has previously lambasted the city, wrote on X Wednesday.