Feb 9, 2026 - News
Super Bowl LX takeaways
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
👋 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.