THE SUPER BOWL: SPORT and SPECTACLE

It’s Super Bowl week, offering an  opportunity for contemplating the upcoming game and what the Super Bowl  means in our culture. It’s only a football game, but over the time of its existence – this year’s game is the 53^rd edition (LIII, the National Football League insists) – it has become a national gathering event, bringing more people together for one activity than nearly anything else in American society.

Pro Football: Television Juggernaut 

Well over 100 million Americans annually watch the Super

Bowl.  With NFL television ratings up during the 2018 regular season, this year’s game might eclipse the record of 114 million viewers set in 2015 for Seattle’s gut wrenching loss to New England (yes, the Seahawks still should have handed Marshawn Lynch the ball). The NFL has had its ratings challenges recently, thanks mostly to the national anthem controversy and President Trump’s posturing. Concern about head injuries and brain damage for players may also have reduced interest in the game. High powered offenses, however, led by young quarterbacks like Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, Houston’s DeShaun Watson, Baker Mayfield in Cleveland, and Jared Goff of the Los Angeles Rams, apparently helped bring fans back.

Have doubts about pro football’s dominance of the American sports landscape? This year, 46 of the 50 most watched telecasts – of any kind – between September and December were NFL games.  Also, just consider television viewership for professional sports in the United States. Major

League Baseball, once the national pastime, drew an average of 14.3 million viewers for the five games of the 2018 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox. The four games of the 2018 National Basketball Association Finals drew an average of 17.5 million viewers. Even the scintillating seven game series between Cleveland and Golden State in 2017 averaged only 20.3 million. 

The Super Bowl: National Gathering Spot

The massive viewership results from more than pro football’s overwhelming popularity. The NFL wouldn’t get the massive number of people watching the big game had it not realized the need for marketing the contest to casual fans, especially women. In 2017 nearly half (47%) the Super Bowl’s viewers were women. By making the game a family or couple attraction, the NFL has gotten past its core viewership. With the Super Bowl telecast about a lot more than football, the NFL garners an audience of both casual fans and hard core football fanatics.

How’d the NFL do this? Start with the television  commercials.  Go to any office the day after the Super Bowl and it’s common to find as much or more talk about the commercials as the game itself. Advertisers, who this year will pay a little over $5 million for a thirty second ad, ramp up their creative efforts so they can get a buzz from their Super Bowl spots.

Another innovation that attracts casual fans has been big name musical acts as the half-time entertainment. Now, instead of marching bands, we get the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Janet Jackson (wardrobe malfunction no extra charge), or Beyonce. This year’s performers are Maroon 5, a three-time Grammy-award winning pop-rock band particularly attractive to millennials, and rapper Travis Scott. He agreed he’d appear only after the NFL pledged it would give his favorite charity $500,000.

                       

Finally,through year-round  adverting, the  NFL's food and beverage sponsors encourage gathering of fans for Super Bowl parties.  Each of us, for example, annually attend Super Bowl parties, often with people we otherwise see only a few other times a year. The NFL marketing machine now influences our social meeting habits.  Perhaps members of Congress might try getting together at a Super Bowl party.

What about this Year’s Game?

Marketing, sociology, and economics notwithstanding, they will play a football game Sunday, February 3, in Atlanta. Five-time Super Bowl winner New England and its relentless duo of coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady meet the upstart Los Angeles Rams, led by wunderkind Sean McVay, the youngest-ever Super Bowl head coach, and young gun quarterback Goff.

The Rams probably have the better team, but Brady and     

Belichick are awfully hard to beat, especially  by inexperienced players and coaches. They demonstrated that in the AFC championship game when, for a while, the Patriot defense confused Mahomes and Brady surgically carved up the game, but fatigued, talent-challenged Kansas City defense.

The two championship games, both of which went into  overtime, raised the possibility officiating or the NFL’s overtime rules could decide the Super Bowl game. Los Angeles reached the Super Bowl with a mighty assist in the NFC championship game from the horrific miss of a

blatant pass interference penalty late in their win over New Orleans. Could such an abomination decide pro football’s championship? Of course it could. New England outlasted Kansas City in part because the Patriots won the overtime coin toss, took the ball, and scored. Mahomes and the explosive Kansas City offense never saw the field. Just saying, but under the college overtime rule, each team gets a turn with the ball. Just saying.

In any event, the game will captivate a lot of the country until it’s played. When it’s over we’ll start talking about the April NFL draft, June organized team activities (OTAs), July training camps, September’s start to the 2019 regular season, and next year’s Super Bowl. The NFL has this figured out, doesn’t it?