Preparing for our National Football Holiday

If you think the NFL season ends Sunday night you’re wrong. It really ended two weeks ago when they played the NFC & AFC Championship games.

I know the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos are playing at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California but the 50^th Super Bowl will be another reminder that the game is only a small part of what has become a mega-event. So big it’s like a national holiday. I’ve watched every one of the 49 previous games which by the way was not called the Super Bowl in the beginning. The first was officially the AFL-NFL Championship Game and the next two were the World Championship Game.

For many years it was simply a football game played in the afternoon but things started changing sometime in the 1980s when Super Bowl parties became the rage and the debate was not always about who had the best offense but what was the best TV commercial.

Flash forward to today and the hype includes halftime shows, who sings the National Anthem and of course those 30-second TV commercials which will cost as much as $5 million. For many advertisers that’s well worth it to be seen by 114.4 million people which is how many tuned in last year, making it the most-watched TV program in American history. As a matter of fact the top five programs are all Super Bowls. For the record the cost of a TV ad for the first game in 1967 was $37,500.

Here’s a few other Super Bowl tidbits:

• Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest day for food consumption in the U.S. behind only Thanksgiving. Top choices include dips and spreads, chicken wings and pizza. Guacamole has been a big favorite in recent years as over 100 million pounds will be consumed. Beer drinking is down a bit but about 325 million gallons will be guzzled…more than any other day but July 4^th.
• The halftime show with feature Coldplay with a guest appearance by Beyoncé. Lady Gaga will sing the National Anthem. For the first game in 1967 trumpeter Al Hirt and two college bands performed at halftime and the UCLA choir sang the National Anthem.
• You can bet on just about everything concerning the game in Las Vegas including the coin toss which of course is a 50-50 proposition. In the previous 49 Super Bowls tails has come up 25 times and heads 24.

I really don’t care for either team but I’m picking Carolina 30-21 and Cam Newton will become the fifth player to win both the Heisman Trophy and Super Bowl MVP.