The wait is nearly over. Every February, party bettors and die-hard gamblers alike come together to celebrate the most-wagered-on contest of the sports calendar: the Super Bowl. There are seemingly more prop bets available for the Super Bowl than most sports have for an entire season, and the national anthem is the event's melodic starter's pistol.

Betting on the anthem length is tradition, as much a part of Super Bowl party history as the wings and nachos everyone gathers around while they listen to the song being performed. Most treat it as a frivolity, a light diversion where the action is for fun and the outcome is a coin flip. But true maniacs know anything can be cracked, and the anthem bet is a harbinger for the rest of a gambler's slip.

This year the anthem will be performed by multi-hyphenate Jon Batiste, and the over-under on length opened at 120.5 seconds.

So, to find the signal in the noise, or in this case, the single star in that spangled banner, we break down three key factors to a successful anthem wager.

"The Star-Spangled Banner," originally known as "The Defence of Fort M'Henry," began as a poem written by Francis Scott Key in 1814. It was written as a four-stanza poem, but the first stanza really took off. If poems can be hits, "The Defence of Fort M'Henry" was a certified one, and somewhere along the line, an early ancestor of the modern DJ decided to set it to music. Ironically, they chose a tune composed for a British social club, but no one seemed to mind that detail, and the remix burned up the charts long enough that the United States declared it the national anthem in 1931. Since then, it has been played before virtually every sporting event at every level.

None of that is particularly germane to betting on how long this particular performance will go, but you now have some fun facts to dispense if there's a lull in conversation or some ice that needs breaking. What is important about the history is it paints the picture of just how long the song has been performed and how many opportunities there have been to vary the presentation.

At its base level, "The Star-Spangled Banner" is a jaunty tune, usually written in the three-quarter time signature and set to 106 beats per minute. Performed this way, it clocks in at one minute and 19 seconds. That's the version you most often get before lower-stakes events like high school wrestling matches or summer baseball doubleheaders. It's usually in the form of a tinny recording played over a PA system or performed by the unlucky second-chair members of a school marching band.

When it's sung, individuals rarely perform it that fast unless they're very nervous or trying to get off a below-zero field in December. But the "as-written" length demonstrates just how much space one has to fill to reach a two-minute performance, which is where this year's line is set. Even with the millions of renditions over the years, the national anthem wraps up in under 120 seconds more often than not when performed by voice. To get past two minutes, a singer has to have the pipes to confidently hold long notes in one of the most notoriously difficult songs to sing, lean on instrumental interludes, or both. The Super Bowl is the highest-profile setting for the anthem performance, so artists tend to draw it out, making it a mini-event unto itself. But even with that pomp and circumstance, how many of them have actually stretched past our two-minute mark?

Since 1990, there have been 14 performances that went 120 seconds or longer. Most recently, Chris Stapleton reached 121 seconds in 2023, which would clear this year's line but was under the posted time of 125 seconds. Alicia Keys holds the record at two minutes and 36 seconds, hitting the over by 21 seconds in a 2013 performance that took longer than some Super Bowl-winning drives. Keys started a run of long renditions, with the next four singers going longer than two minutes before Pink stopped the streak in 2018.

While one performance doesn't necessarily inform the next, things are trending toward length. Since Keys' marathon, seven of the last 11 performances have been 120 seconds or more. Compare that to the '90s, when five singers posted times of 1:40 or shorter. (For those curious, the fastest Super Bowl anthem time belongs to Neil Diamond, who posted a blistering 62 seconds in 1987.)

So, with that in mind, there's only one thing left.

Batiste is the musician's musician. You could start reading his CV this minute and not finish before Sunday. He is a composer, band leader, singer, producer, TV personality and on and on. He has won an Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA and may one day need a storage unit for all his Grammys (five so far). It seems like there is no instrument he cannot play and no note he cannot hit.

All this is to say, if you were hoping his anthem performance history (and it is a substantial one) was a predictor, you're out of luck. He has performed it dozens of times, in dozens of ways, with dozens of lengths. He's plucked it out on guitar, tickled the ivories, been backed by a band and sung a cappella. In 2020, he performed it for the opening of the NBA season and, using piano, guitar and a rhythm machine, he wove "The Star-Spangled Banner" with "Lift Every Voice and Sing," never singing a note. (That performance came in at roughly 1:47.)

So the door is wide open for interludes on any instrument, variance to any tempo and innovations of any kind.

Speaking of tempo and innovations, the Super Bowl is in Batiste's home city, New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. (He was born in Metairie, part of the metro area.) His family is Crescent City musical royalty, featuring several members of nationally known brass bands and several more with their own Wikipedia pages. The pre-game Super Bowl musical performances have been billed as a celebration of New Orleans' musical history, with hometown acts like Ledisi and Trombone Shorty also on the bill. Given the setting and Batiste's family legacy, it's unlikely he'll breeze through the highlight performance.