History of the Super Bowl: A Humorous Look at this Religious Holiday

Super Bowl LX logo. Image: Wikipedia

HISTORY OF THE SUPER BOWL

Super Bowl™ is a territory-acquisition athletic contest played on a fixed agrarian grid, using an inflated porcine prolate spheroid as a token.

Some will say it is the most important holiday of the year in America. While it is ostensibly a secular holiday, others argue it is truly a religious holiday. And there are several reasons why. Super Bowl has:

• A liturgy
• Multiple prayers
• Special foods
• Formal rituals that have developed throughout history
• Hundreds of millions of celebrants in front of their TV for worship

It used to be that commercials were the part of the worship service when people took a bio break, but not anymore. The commercials are now the service’s most influential part (for at least 22% of viewers); indeed, some (like me) watch the Super Bowl specifically for the advertisements.

Super Bowl Advertisements

Ad slots have been sold out for a while now. A 30-second advertisement spot on the Super Bowl costs $10 million, although the total cost for a Super Bowl campaign, including production and agency fees, can range from $15 million to $50 million. The average cost of an ad in the Super Bowl has almost doubled over the last ten years. By comparison, a 30-second ad for the 1967 game sold for $37,500, though adjusted for inflation, it would be $345,551 in today’s money. That’s now what a second of airtime costs.

Google observes that those companies that post their ads on YouTube before the game receive more views than those that don’t. Over 200 million viewers will watch the program, making it the year’s most-watched television program.

Who can forget the premiere of Apple Macintosh ¹, directed by Sir Ridley Scott (who directed Blade Runner, Gladiator, and Alien), during the 1984 Super Bowl, when the ad closed with:

Macintosh SuperBowl advertisement, 1984

Super Bowl: a Holiday?

In 2017, Kraft Heinz started a petition with over 70,000 supporters to make the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday called Smunday. Their employees already got that day off to recover, and they wanted the same holiday for the 16 million Americans who would otherwise call in sick that year.

Super Bowl Food

After Thanksgiving Day, more food is consumed on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year. These are usually selected for their high caloric index, sodium content, crunch factor, and carbonated inebriating fluids.

A nationally authorized “cheat day,” many will suspend their New Year’s Dieting Resolution… for just this one day.

• 67% more pizza is eaten on Super Bowl Sunday than on average days
• $1.3 billion is spent on beer
• $517 million on soft drinks
• 4 million pounds of pretzels are consumed
• 2.5 million pounds of nuts
• 8 million pounds of popcorn
• 29 million pounds of chips
• 8 million pounds of guacamole

… some crediting the Super Bowl for popularizing the Avocado; Americans eat more avocados on this day than any other day of the year. 

Super Bowl Decorations

Not only is food a significant part of this holiday, but decorations are as well. Consider Supermarkets (named after the Super Bowl) that decorate the chips aisle as if it were Christmas. If you work for Frito-Lay, it is Christmas.

Super Bowl Ancient History

Super Bowl has been the modern name for the professional football championship since 1967, a name that extends back to Roman antiquity. This will be Super Bowl LX, the Roman numerals for 60, to honor those Roman roots of gladiatorial contests.

This contest is between the conferences of the National Football League (NFL), named for the “League,” the unit of measurement used to express the distance a Roman citizen could walk in 1 hour. However, the modern game is about four times that length of time, even though there are four 15-minute quarters. Go figure.

The NFL is divided neatly into two unequal halves: the NFC (National Football Conference) and the AFC (American Football Conference). These conferences are each further subdivided into Meetups, Get-togethers, and One-on-Ones.

The Super Bowl will not involve the CIFL (Continental Indoor Football League) because it is not a TLA (Three-Letter Acronym). The winner of the Super Bowl will be declared the “world champion of football.” This ignores other inhabited countries that may point out that they call soccer “football,” and they have a championship involving not a Bowl but a Cup. And involvement from teams from outer space is out of the question. For space action, we’ll have to wait for the next Star Trek movie.

What’s In A Name?

Where does the word “bowl” come from? Initially, it came from the Rose Bowl, a college football contest held in Pasadena, CA, and held in an elliptical stadium.

In ancient Rome, a stadium was a sporting venue where foot races were held. But spectator gladiatorial contests like this were held in amphitheatres, like the Colosseum in Rome.

To be more historically accurate, the Colosseum was called the Flavian Amphitheatre, so named from the two ancient Greek root words amphi+theatron because they were made up of two theatres joined together, or literally theatres on both sides. But that is more ancient history than most people can handle.

This year, the Super Bowl will be played at Levi Stadium, the home of the San Francisco 49ers. The stadium capacity is 68,500. It is located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, in Santa Clara. Levi Stadium is named after Levi Strauss, the founder of Levi’s jeans in San Francisco in 1850, following the 1849 Gold Rush. 

Halftime

It is nominally named for occurring approximately in the middle of the game, though the second half can be much longer and extend into overtime. The current rules allow both teams in a playoff game to possess the ball at least once in overtime, regardless of a touchdown scored by the team that has the first possession.

Unlike many other football broadcasts, this halftime event is actually shown to the TV audience watching from home. These festivities feature first-class and second-rate musical performers, some with questionable taste in attire, others with costuming clumsiness or so-called “wardrobe malfunctions.”

Two Minute Warning

Two-minute Warning

While using a clock, the Super Bowl does not intend that this is to be understood as representing actual “wall clock” time. Instead, it uses poetic license to represent an epochal period that could last 30 minutes or an hour and a half, given overtimes. Then it ends in sudden death – just like those gladiatorial games.

Super Bowl Protests and Boycotts

Just as there’s nothing more American than the Super Bowl, there’s nothing more American than dissent and counter-dissent. Considering the number of eyeballs glued to the screen for this event, it’s inevitable.

One of the protests may be from the world of Baseball, the so-called “All-American Sport”:

Football vs. Baseball vs. Basketball. Image: Gallup

Football From the World of Science

Sagittarius A*

A new study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory finds that the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, is spinning so quickly around its axis that it is warping spacetime. It is being done in a way that it is shaped like a football. Just a coincidence?

Super Bowl Fun Facts to Impress Friends and Family

• A Super Bowl I ticket in 1967 cost $6 to $12. Now, a single ticket costs between $6,119 and $8,713 on Ticketmaster before fees and taxes. Last year’s average ticket price was $8,076
  
  
• The 2025 Super Bowl LIX had a record 127.7 million viewers.
  
  
• About 26.21 million people will miss at least some work the day after the Super Bowl, according to a Harris Poll. This absenteeism is projected to cost businesses up to $5.2 billion in lost productivity

Super Bowl Celebration

There is one reason for celebrating at the end of the Super Bowl, especially for “football widows” or “football widowers” like me. It means the end of the professional football season for the year! At least until August.

Will you be watching this year?

¹ This was not the very first airing of that famous commercial. It had been shown just before midnight on December 31, 1983, on KMVT-TV in Twin Falls, Idaho, to be eligible for that year’s advertising awards.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com    

Podcast: