This year in Arlington over 100,000 people will descend on Cowboys Stadium for the 45th edition of the Super Bowl. Millions more in the U.S. and around the world will put everything in their live aside as the final professional football game of the season is played.
Companies will spend upwards of $3 million for a 30 second commercial. More than nine million slices of pizza will be sold and over 160 million avocados will be consumed. Last season in Tampa Bay over 55,000 hot dogs were consumed at the stadium alone. The only other day where more food is consumed in the U.S. is Thanksgiving.
I think it is safe to say that we like this game.
Few events have become as important a part of the culture in the United States as the Super Bowl. No other sporting event has been used to predict how the stock market would perform or which political party’s candidate was going to win the presidency. Eleven of the top 25 watched telecasts of all-time have been Super Bowls (nearly half the nation tuned in to watch Super Bowl XVI). Super Bowl XLIV knocked the finale of Mash out of the top spot after 27 years as the most watched broadcast in the history of television.
Eventually the stock market and election myths were proven false, but the fact that the correlation existed for a time just goes to show how much importance is placed on the existence of this game. What even more amazing is that the game is something that nearly did not happen.
When it started professional football was not real popular. It was the treated more like the illegitimate child in comparison to college football; we know you are there, but we just don’t want to claim you publicly. Early players were paid little; the first openly paid player was John Brallier of the Latrobe Athletic Association. His salary--$10 a game.
In fact, the first version of the Super Bowl came thanks to baseball for some odd reason refusing to play in a World Series in 1902. A few football teams took notice of this and decided to organize into a tournament of sorts with the champions to be crowned in the short-lived World Series of Football (which was also the first indoor professional football game).
It would be another 20 years before the NFL as we know it would form and another 10 after that before it would even have a championship game. The first broadcast would not be till 1939 (on NBC). There were so few fans in attendance that the network had them all sit in the same section so that when one of the two cameras used panned over the ‘crowd’ the stadium looked full.
Fast forward 28 years to 1967, the AFL and NFL merge with plans to play for a championship between the best teams of each, and the Super Bowl was born.
Initially the game was far from super with Vince Lombardi and his Green Bay Packers dominating the AFC representatives. The game would not be known as ‘Super’ until the third installment of the game in 1969 between the New York Jets and the Baltimore Colts.
Since then the game has grown in just about any and every way imaginable. College bands performed at seven of the first nine games. Now we have the biggest names in music clamoring to do condensed versions of their songs on what has become a worldwide stage viewed by over a 100 million people.
The evolution of the game is not more evident anywhere than it is in the cost of tickets. At the first Super Bowl at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles tickets went for between $6-12. By time the Denver Broncos played in SB XII the average price had gone up to $30. Fast forward to Denver’s fourth trip to the big game, SB XXV, and prices had increased to $125. Last season a pair of tickets to SB XLIV went for more than $1700; more than double the rate at which home prices have risen since 1967.
Along the way the game has been kind enough to provide us with moments of hilarity, usually by proving how absent minded people can be:
Julie Brown to Dallas Cowboy Emmitt Smith prior to his 1993 Super Bowl game against Buffalo: "What are you going to wear in the game Sunday?"
Craig Kilborn, commenting on the Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime incident: "[The 'wardrobe malfunction' was] so crass and so sleazy that Fox television is launching its own investigation [as to] why they didn't do it first."
A Fox sports reporter to Washington Redskins Quarterback Doug Williams
"How long have you been a black quarterback?"
The game has definitely come along way in 45 seasons with some truly iconic moments along the way. Broadway Joe Namath’s guarantee in SB III will always rate as one of the boldest moves ever. Leon Lett will always stand as an n example of why you don’t celebrate till after you’ve done something good. There will never be a larger or more full fullback than William ‘The Refrigerator’ Perry in SB XX. Few will ever forget how long that yard looked when Kevin Dyson was tackled short of the goal line in SB XXXIV. John Elway’s helicopter-like moment in SB XXXII will forever be on of the coolest first down runs in the history of the game.
Amazingly there are still some things that have never happened in a Super Bowl. There has yet to be snow, although we have had rain twice. There has yet to be a team kept off the scoreboard completely, although there have been offenses that have failed to score. No fair catches have ever been attempted and while we have come close there has yet to be an overtime game. Four teams are still hoping to get to the big game.
The game is something to be appreciated. John Elway had it right when he said:
“I've always joked about Joe Montana not appreciating his Super Bowls nearly as much as I do because he never lost one. We lost three before we got one.”
Here’s to looking forward to Super Bowl XLV and to many more after that.
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