Super Event XLVIII

In the days before the Super Bowl, I heard the usual commercials on the radio and television. Grocery stores advertised deals on bags of chips, meat companies advertised deals on hot dogs and sausages and electronics stores tried to convince me that I’d enjoy the game more if I watched it on a brand new television—the bigger the better.

Missing from all of these advertisements was any mention of the Super Bowl. They all talked about “The Big Game” or “Game Day” or referenced our “Championship Parties,” as though trying to reach us via some sort of special code.

It turns out, that’s exactly what they were doing.

The NFL has copyrighted the term “Super Bowl,” which means that only companies who enter into special licensing deals with the NFL can use the term Super Bowl. That’s where all of those Big Game commercials come from.

So Papa John’s (official sponsor) can use Super Bowl, while Pizza Hut (not an official sponsor), is relegated to referring to the Big Game.

The irony here is that although the NFL wants us all to watch the Super Bowl (so they can charge a lot of money for the commercials), and they want us all to buy lots of stuff to enjoy while watching the Super Bowl (so the companies buying those commercials will sell more product and want to buy more commercials next year), they don’t want the companies to explicitly tell us what event we’re buying the stuff for. That leaves us with this nod, nod, wink, wink messaging.

However, the bigger irony is that the NFL has trademarked the term Super Bowl, yet I think when many people think of the Super Bowl, they think of everything that goes along with it as much or even more than the game itself.

I know that a football game is played on Super Bowl Sunday, and that this past Super Bowl turned out to be the highest-rated television event in history with 111.5 million viewers. But at least half of those viewers tune in for the Super Bowl event, as opposed to the Super Bowl game.

The AFC Championship game drew 51.3 million viewers this year and the NFC Championship game drew 55.9 million. Assuming that true fans of football and the NFL wouldn’t want to miss the conference championship games, there are 60 million extra viewers for the Super Bowl. Surely all of those people aren’t waiting with bated breath to see whether the Seahawks or Broncos will win.

Think of how many times you’ve heard someone say that they watch the Super Bowl to see the commercials. (There’s even a website that’s devoted to nothing other than Super Bowl commercials.) I’ve been at parties where the loudest reaction of the evening came from a creative commercial and not from anything that happened in the game itself.

And the most-watched part of the Super Bowl? Not the pre-game. Not the kickoff. It was the half-time show with 115.3 millions viewers—more than watched the game itself!

It’s obvious that Super Bowl Sunday is about much more than the Super Bowl game. It has to be. How else do we explain Girl’97, Boy’04, Boy’06 and Girl’10 (my four kids and the years of their birth) sitting down to watch a stinkin’ football game, after having watched only about fifteen minutes of football during the entire NFL season? (I’ll give you a hint, it had something to do with the impressive party menu created by their mother!)

So the ultimate irony is that on the NFL’s biggest day, the NFL is largely irrelevant. Half the people watching don’t even care about the game, and most of the other half don’t even care who wins the game.

Yet we still tune in.

And we wait for the entertaining commercials, and we eat food with no nutritional value, and we watch singers lip-synch, and if a football game breaks out, why then that’s just icing on the cake!

Wondering what television show had the second highest rating while the Super Bowl was on? Downton Abbey on PBS! It drew 6.8 million viewers, which is the third straight impressive showing up against the Super Bowl. And even considering the game, the commercials and the singing, Downton Abbey—which I watched on DVR later that night—was still more entertaining.

But I ate better food during the Super Bowl!