Each year between Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January and Presidents’ Day in February, our nation pauses to celebrate a great national holiday.
OK. Super Bowl Sunday is not designated as an official holiday. But in all other respects, the day set aside for determining the championship of the National Football League is very much a holiday throughout the United States.
In fact, the way we observe this day strongly suggests that, aside form Christmas and Thanksgiving, Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of celebration in the country.
As Super Bowl Sunday approaches, we are reminded of just how big the day really is by the various published statistics.
For example:
Americans consume more calories per service (a whopping 6,000) during the week of the Super Bowl than any other week, including Thanksgiving, according to a Cornell University study. Estimates from various sources indicate that we will spend more than $50 million on food in the four days leading up to the game. We will consume 4,000 tons of popcorn, 8 million pounds of guacamole, 14,500 tons of chips, 5,000 pounds of hotdogs and 1.25 billion chicken wings. It is also the busiest day of the year, by far, for pizza deliveries. We will wash all that food down with 50 million cases of beer.
Is it any wonder that the Monday following the Super Bowl, 1.5 million of us are expected to call in “sick” and miss work?
American holidays, the ones we really celebrate, have become famous as being days of conspicuous consumption. If that’s the standard, there is no real argument to suggest that Super Bowl Sunday has not established itself as a “real holiday.”
And, as is the case with Christmas, Super Bowl Sunday is a big day for commercialism.
In 1967, a 30-second advertising spot during the first Super Bowl cost $42,000. This year, advertisers will pay a whopping $4.5 million for a half-minute ad.
That might seem an extraordinary sum until you realize the unique aspect of these ads.
The Super Bowl marks the only time we actually run to the bathroom or the kitchen DURING the game so that we don’t miss the ads. Think about that for a minute.
Last year, a record 112.2 million people tuned in to watch the game – and the ads.
After the game is over, Americans are more likely to talk about the TV ads than the game itself. In recent years, some ads have been “leaked” before the game on social media sites, which advertisers understand is a way to maximize the impact of their messages. Ads have become the source of controversy, too. GoDaddy.com released an ad it said was going to air during the game only to pull it after public outcry of its content. The cynic might suggest this was a carefully orchestrated strategy because the GoDaddy.com ad now ranks as the most talked about advertisement never to actually be broadcast.
But advertisers aren’t the only groups that seek to attach themselves, barnacle-like, to the Super Bowl.
In 1993, an activist group held a press conference in Pasadena, California, the site of the Super Bowl to reveal that Super Bowl Sunday was the single greatest day of violence against women. The group said visits to the emergency room were at their highest on that day and that women’s shelters were overwhelmed by women seeking refuge from abusive partners on that day.
The media ran with it, of course, and you still hear that claim, even though reporters at the Washington Post and Boston Globe reported soon after that press conference that there was no evidence to support those claims.
Observers should take heed. Not every claim connected with the Super Bowl should be taken as fact. For a lot of folks with an agenda, the Super Bowl is a great opportunity to let the ends justify the means. So if someone tells you that more cats are thrown off tall buildings on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day, rest easy.
It probably isn’t so.
At least, I hope not.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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