How Super Bowl Sunday became the Most Important Day of Year

“It's about subtle prowess, well deployed. You can win a baseball game without hating your opponents … but in football, as skilled as its players are, you had best hate your opponent, or at least simulate some hatred for the space of 60 minutes of play. Football is urban, tough and based to a large degree on the capacity to overwhelm the other team with sheer force. Football is a tank attack, a sky-borne assault, a charge into the trenches for hand-to-hand fighting. Football is following orders and sticking to the strategy; it's about acting as a unit and taking hits for the group. Football is generals (coaches) and captains (quarterbacks) and the enlisted guys who play on the line.”[1]

This masterful quote is from a Los Angeles Times article written by UVA English professor Mark Edmonson as he explained football’s growing dominance over American culture. Football is a 60-minute war, no doubt about it. It’s grueling, punishing, magnificent, heartbreaking, rewarding but most of all, important. Its significance can go unrecognized by most, but be sure to understand that it truly does have a seat at the table of important factors in American culture. Baseball is America’s pastime and has the deepest roots in American history from the Civil War to World War One & Two , but as Mary McGrory put it best, “Baseball is what we were, football is what we’ve become.”[2]

The NFL’s popularity and growth in American culture has made its championship game, the Super Bowl, one of the biggest days on the American calendar. The Super Bowl, beginning in 1967, has become the single most important sporting event in America, and even more than that, it is one of the most cultural, social, economic, and emotional days on the American calendar every year.

The NFL started in 1920 with 14 teams, each composed of only 16 players. The initial entrance fee into the American Professional Football Association (the original name) was only $100 and the inaugural president of the league was legendary athlete Jim Thorpe. In 1922 the APFA changed their the title to one we’re familiar with – the National Football League. [3] From 1920 to 1929 player salaries increased from $10 and $15 a game to almost $200 per game, and back in the day ticket prices ranged from 50 cents to $2.[4] The low ticket sales compared to the amount being spent on salaries, travel costs, and equipment brought instability for some of the owners who found it difficult to keep up the costs of running a professional football team. Teams started and folded so quickly that by 1929 fifty-five teams entered the league, and of those fifty-five only four are still in operation today.[5] Throughout the Great Depression, many teams folded completely with no chance to return, and the league operated off and on with no real consistency.

Despite this volatility, other businessmen saw value in the league and professional football. From 1933-1943, eleven new millionaire owners purchased teams, and in every one of those years the NFL made efforts in creating effective rule changes to make the game more entertaining.[6] The new owners and the rule changes saved the game of professional football during the Great Depression, but the game was still marred by the bad public image of being a dirty and boring game and the popularity of the league did not gain any traction until the watershed boom of professional sports following World War II.

As the popularity of sports in general grew after World War II, many cities wanted NFL franchises to have a spectator sport in their community, but the NFL refused to expand. In their defense, this was probably smart, the NFL didn’t want talent getting watered down; they didn’t want the league to become unmanageable at such a peak of popularity. Also, the NFL didn’t want to make a premature decision on a franchise in a city that might not be able to sustain those franchises, and shut down the team. Moreover, NFL owners thought creating more teams would dilute the popularity of their teams, costing them more money than it would be making for the League so they decided not to expand and keep their monopoly on professional football right where it was. Millionaires who wanted a team in their city don’t but weren’t invited to the party didn’t want to hear these excuses, so they decided to get together and build their own league.

The development of other leagues was inevitable after the war ended; there was talk of three different leagues that all had ambitions of becoming the NFL’s rival. There were three leagues that had the most potential to rival the NFL – the Trans-American Football League, the United States Football League, and the All-American Football Conference.[7] The only league that acquired adequate financial support from wealthy owners and support from fans was the All-American Football Conference, or AAFC.[8]

With the development of this new league, the NFL was facing direct competition that the MLB never faced; a league that was legitimate enough to take away from the financial growth and attention of fans from the NFL. The AAFC opened their inaugural season in 1946 with 12 teams in both cities without NFL franchises and cities with existing NFL franchises. Chicago now had three teams, two in the NFL one in the AAFC; New York also had three teams, one in the NFL and two in the AAFC; Los Angeles (after the NFL’s Cleveland Rams moved there after 1945) went from zero teams to two teams in 1946, one in each league. There were now new cities with football, both in unconventional locations and on the west coast for the first time. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and Buffalo all were granted franchises in the creation of the AAFC; these four markets would help expand the popularity of professional football in areas where college football had not been very popular.

The NFL owners were concerned that the new AAFC, which entered its territory in Chicago and New York, would threaten the integrity of the NFL as well as draw fans away from their teams. The NFL owners were very bitter about the newly formed league and did not like the competition, basically creating an embargo on relations to the AAFC. This is how the “Four Years War” started.

When college football players graduated, they had traditionally entered the NFL Draft. The AAFC saw this as an opportunity to legitimize their league by outbidding NFL draftees to come to their league. Had there been a common draft that both leagues participated in, it would have helped both leagues save time and money. But instead, the leagues conducted their own drafts, then entered bidding wars to get the college players they desired.

Further, although the AAFC initially decided that it wouldn’t poach NFL players to join their league, they had no choice when the NFL refused to work with them. The NFL handed out multi-year suspensions for players that switched leagues, basically exiling them for their football careers if they left. The result of this competition was player salaries skyrocketing to nonsensical amounts[9] in both the NFL and AAFC – this also meant both leagues desperately relied on fan attendance to keep rising. The popularity of football had grown substantially from the 1946-1948 seasons – with the NFL experiencing a 20% increase in the 1946 season and the AAFC a 10% increase.[10] Even with the growth in attendance, the bidding wars for players had gotten too expensive to keep up. Only three NFL teams turned a profit in 1946, and only one team in the AAFC made a profit.[11] Two AAFC owners had to call it quits as they were losing so much money; the Miami Seahawks, who lost the most money in either league, was sold and shipped up to Baltimore, and the Chicago Rockets had been sold, but remained in Chicago. [12]

Teams from both leagues continued to lose money in the 1947-1948 seasons even as player salaries continued to increase. In addition, after the growth in attendance in 1946, it went down between 1947 and 1948. The existence of both leagues threatened the future of professional football for both leagues. The growing lack of interest is mostly rooted in the fact that neither league could legitimize itself as the better league since the NFL refused to negotiate any sort of deal with the AAFC to play a “World Series of Football.”[13] Instead of allegiance to one league or the other, most fans decided it was best not to have allegiance in either and moved on to other sports, or didn’t go to the games.

The NFL’s popularity took even more hits as multiple players on a multitude of teams were accused of taking money to throw games, and ultimately a handful of players were either convicted or banned from the NFL.[14] The NFL was also criticized for refusing to work with the AAFC, which many people felt was hurting the chances of professional football to grow. The NFL owners were severely stubborn and most owners refused to mention or acknowledge the AAFC publicly, until 1947 when disgruntled Eagles owner Alexis Thompson was tired of paying players too much and felt the urge to put an end to the Four Years War. He was the first NFL owner to publicly express that a deal needed to be made with the AAFC – because without one, both leagues would drive each other under the ground and pro football would be lost. [15]

With both leagues continuing to struggle in 1949, league owners from both sides got the ball rolling on fixing their issues. The power struggle between the leagues was the first speed bump in the negotiations, as the NFL wanted to be in control of the negotiations since they had lost less money than the AAFC and had been around longer but the AAFC had been more popular since their attendance was roughly 10% stronger than NFL attendance.[16] The presence of seasoned and ‘hallowed’ owners like the Steelers Arthur Rooney, the Giants Wellington Mara, and the Bears George Halas eventually gave the NFL controlling power. Initially, the NFL agreed only to take the AAFC’s two most successful franchises, the San Francisco 49ers and Cleveland Browns. The AAFC rejected this offer and wanted to include the Baltimore owners, whose success on the field had been limited but the patronage was strong. Adding Baltimore to the NFL was complicated by the demand of Washington Redskins owner George Marshall that Baltimore pay him a $250,000 fee for entering what he declared as his territory.[17]

Throughout 1949 the leagues struggled to reach an agreement, but after Marshall lowered his price to $150,000 and the Baltimore owners opened a public service fund to the people of Baltimore to help keep their franchise, an agreement was finally reached and the NFL agreed to add three teams, increasing to a total of 13 teams in 1950.[18] The biggest winner in this agreement was undoubtedly the NFL, as the balance of power shifted from the players back to the owners. Player salaries declined in the coming years, while the income for the teams increased, creating a more stable league with more appropriate player salaries. The “Four Years War of Professional Football,” as it was referred to by the sports media, gained exposure for the NFL, and created a truly national league with teams from coast to coast and plenty of franchises in between. From 1950 to 1958 there was little change in the NFL other than how television was affecting the game. Now that the league had established its members, it needed to go out and make itself popular once again.

Professional football had always taken a backseat to college football and professional baseball, and arguably maybe even behind horse racing and boxing. Baseball thrived in the early half of the twentieth century because it didn’t rely on being on television, it was slow moving game and everyone knew where 1st, 2nd, and 3rd base is and the positions were all in the same spot on the field. In boxing, there were only two competitors per match swinging at each other in a small ring. In horseracing, all that needs to be made clear is which horse is winning. It doesn’t require you to see the players to understand who’s at an advantage or disadvantage. These three sports all thrived on radio.

Football needed the visual draw that radio couldn’t provide. But as visual broadcasting expanded, football was a match made in heaven with television. To truly appreciate football, you need to have the television in front of you, and you need to see the physicality, the bone shaking blocks, the oncoming blitzes, the long down field passes, the cutbacks for long runs. Football takes place on just about every inch of the 120x55½ square yards of grass, which is impossible to describe only through radio. The viewer can see a blitz coming, or a pass play developing, but it’s impossible to explain all the pre-play and commotion through a radio microphone, and even harder to explain and make the listener understand what all 22 players on the field are doing. It is the most premiere television sport of its time.

Sports on television were not something that just instantaneously happened, televisions evolved from radio, which evolved from newspapers. Sports broadcasting took major strides from its early days in the 1920s to its explosion in the 1970s brought on by major changes in the 1950s and 1960s. Sports broadcasting of live events and bonus coverage could not have happened without the increased exposure sports received in the media during the growth of media in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sports first gained popularity in print. While magazines and newspapers had been around for roughly 100 plus years, sports coverage in those magazines didn’t come about until the 1920s thanks to scandals like the 1919 Black Sox, characters like Babe Ruth establishing their prominence, the upstart of professional football in 1920, and college football garnering attention and gaining traction as a dominant sport and large-scale money producer for university. College Football trumped professional football in the 1920s, and through the Great Depression the NFL had its biggest struggles trying to stay afloat. During the Great Depression, people needed feel good stories and something to root for to give their lives some purpose or feel better about, and sports were easy to come by with good stories and heroic figures. The amount of space that sports took up on the front page of newspapers grew from year to year during the 1920s and 1930s.[19]

Sports took another major step in accessibility as radio became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Teams, originally in baseball and college football, were selling their rights to the local and national radio stations, most notably the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS). Radios were in one out of every four hundred homes in 1920, but in 1929 they were in one-third of homes.[20] Sports became accessible in people’s living rooms, and the need for analysis and coverage of sports became necessary. As Robert McChesney said in his article and study of the media’s impact on sports, “the staggering popularity of sport is due, to no small extent, to the enormous amount of attention provided it by the mass media. On the other hand, the media can generate enormous sales in both circulation and advertising based upon their extensive treatment of sport … virtually every single surge in popularity of sport has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the coverage provided sport by the media”[21] Sports and the media have a very “symbiotic”[22] relationship, one helps the other. But in the relationship between radio and sports, while sports were popular on the radio, the contributions in popularity that radio brought to sports exceeds anything sports could have done for radio.

While developments in popularity through newspapers and radio broadcasting, growth through television was even greater. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, sports on television grew as the number of TV sets sold to American consumers increased rapidly. Before sports could thrive on television, televisions needed to first thrive in the homes of Americans. The boom of televisions aligns very close to the growth of the “Baby Boomer” generation. The original baby boomers were born in the late 1940s; at the same time the first broadcasting stations began their programs. At this point in time, 1947, the amount of televisions in homes could be “counted in the thousands.”[23] Only 6,000 televisions came off the manufacturing lines in 1946, but by 1953 more than 7 million would be produced; by the end of the decade 86% of Americans had televisions in their homes, and by the end of the 1960s that number grew to 98%.[24] While early programming had very little diversity and much repetition, one spectacle that grew substantially through television was sports, but it would certainly need some help to make it the spectacle it currently is.

Even with the growth in the number of televisions, the NFL still needed something to help draw attention to the league. In 1958, the NFL was still a league that was viewed as college ball wash-ups wrestling each other in the mud for little pay with their faces and bodies so battered you would have thought they had been boxing as opposed to playing football. The NFL needed a game that would forever legitimize the league. The game it needed was a championship game in the largest city on the biggest scale. The game that the league needed, and what it got, was the 1958 NFL Championship Game played between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, in New York City at Yankee Stadium. It would be the first nationally televised football championship game, and it did not disappoint.

The game featured everything from a ground-and-pound running attack, to some of the first play-action passes and aerial attacks by the Colts. There were special teams heroics, like an early blocked field goal by the Giants, and then there was “gimmick” plays like a long fake reverse pass for huge gains. Johnny Unitas was a wiley undersized Quarterback for the Baltimore Colts that thrived on big game situations and dicey play calls; he described his play calling as “controlled gambling.”[25] The Giants were stacked with old vets on defense like linebacker Sam Huff to college football legends on the offensive side of the football like Frank Gifford. From a pure football perspective, there was almost nothing this game was missing. The Colts found themselves in a predicament with only minutes remaining, but Johnny Unitas led his troops down the field 73 yards to set up the game tying field as time expired. Overtime.

Not only was this the first nationally televised championship game[26] but it was also the first football game to go into overtime. A handful of players did not even know overtime was in the rulebooks. As Johnny Unitas said after the game, “When the game ended in a tie, we were standing on the sideline waiting to see what came next. Suddenly the officials came over and said, ‘Send the captain out. We’re going to flip a coin to see who will receive.’ That was the first we heard of the overtime period.”[27] Sudden death overtime creates great drama and unpredictability; every play could be the last and each play gets more and more important as the game goes on. The Giants won the toss, got the ball first, but the Colts weren’t going to let them do anything with it and the Giants were forced to punt. The Colts drive started at the 30, got to midfield, then on 2nd down, Unitas was sacked for an 8-yard loss setting up a near improbable 3rd and 15, but Johnny wasn’t shaken. He would make two completions to his tight end that would put the Colts in field goal range, but they wanted the end zone. In one of the most dramatic and memorable plays in NFL history, Johnny Unitas turned his back to the end zone on the 1 yard line to hand off to his tailback who leaped head first for the game winning touchdown.

The game would go down in history as possibly the greatest football game ever played. Its impact on the legitimization of football would never be questioned. More than 50 million people viewed the game, the largest audience that had ever viewed a football game on TV. The popularity of professional football form this moment forward would continue to grow, and its value to television stations would never diminish.

Following this game big contributions came by way of Congress when they passed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 that allowed the leagues and their teams to participate in negotiations with broadcasters to sell their rights as a unit, which had previously been considered a breach of antitrust agreements. This meant networks could purchase the broadcast rights from the teams and the league, then sell the airtime during commercial breaks to advertisers. These advertisers in turn, figured out that the sports telecasts were reaching a wider range audience than they had figured, and that ‘blue-collar’ items like beer and razor blades were not the only things that had an impact in advertisements, but items like automobiles and other high-end products could also have an increase in interest being advertised during sports telecasts.[28] The supply of more television broadcasts of sports and football was now meeting demand of people wanting to watch football on TV.

Television would have its greatest impact on one league in particular. The NFL knew it had greater potential on television than on radio for several of the reasons mentioned above, and more importantly they also knew the popularity of the league would grow in cities and states without teams because football truly was the first pure television sport. The NFL under commissioner Bert Bell in 1958 created TV timeouts on the field to allow for tele-broadcasters to sell more commercials during commercial breaks.[29] Next the NFL signed an exclusive TV deal with CBS under new commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1962 for $4.5 million per year, and then two years later when he realized how valuable the NFL product was after it increased by more than 50% in Nielson Ratings (the rating system used to express how popular a TV program is) he negotiated a new deal that was worth $14 million per year.[30] TV rights revenue was the real moneymaker in the NFL; the TV rights became the most valuable asset to the NFL.

By the early 1960’s, professional football was a hot commodity and there was room for competitors. In 1960 an upstart league, the American Football League (AFL), created a place for college football players who weren’t necessarily good enough for the NFL a chance at playing the highly entertaining gladiator sport. The owners of the new teams were owners that had been denied entry into the NFL, and they had a vengeance to be as good as, if not better than, the NFL and they arguably were. Another reason the AFL became so headstrong at wanting to compete with the NFL is because the NFL had made huge amounts of revenue in TV deals. Teams were in cities where NFL teams already existed, like the New York Titans and Dallas Texans. At first no one really thought that the AFL could compete with the NFL but the AFL owners had the wherewithal to compete with the NFL and they garnered attention by stealing three-quarters of the NFL’s first round draft picks in the inaugural 1960 season. The league focused on high-flying offensive attacks and drew fans with high scoring games. AFL franchises were in both the large markets like Los Angeles and New York but also in the smaller markets where football was wanted the most like Kansas City, Buffalo, and Denver.

From 1960-1966 the NFL and AFL waged the ‘Six years’ War’ over who was better on and off the field. Players were caught in bidding wars between teams, which resulted in player salaries skyrocketing for a newer, more competitive sport. The result was massive amounts of money being spent for the players on the field, which in turn drew more people to see the top dollar athletes play. And because there were more people outside the stadium that wanted to see the games, television stations were spending grandiose amounts of money to get the games televised to your living room.

Television deals are what that guaranteed the NFL’s existence and higher popularity over the AFL; with the nation’s leading television station CBS worth over $42 million.[31] At first, the AFL had their own TV deal with ABC, but ABC was not the kind of station CBS or NBC was. ABC’s deal with the AFL kept the AFL afloat long enough to gain enough attention and keep them relatively popular. NBC realized that they needed professional football to be part of their programming, and after the 1964 season when NBC lost in a bidding war to broadcast NFL games to CBS, they went for the AFL in a massive $36 million deal that would guarantee the AFL’s existence in future years as well as help it thrive.[32] This was the moment that the NFL realized the AFL was here to stay and that they would not go away unless it merged with the NFL.

One of the league’s greatest owners, Tex Schramm of the Dallas Cowboys sat down with Sports Illustrated’s most noted NFL writer, Tex Maule, and dictated to him how exactly the NFL merger of 1966 happened. It first started in the early half of 1966, but had been in the works long before that. Owners from different leagues like the AFL’s Ralph Wilson of the Buffalo Bills and the NFL’s Wellington Mara of the New York Giants had discussed it, as well as many other owners, but it never gained any traction until Tex Schramm approached his Dallas neighbor and Kansas City Chiefs owner, Lamar Hunt. Lamar was one of the founding members of the AFL and a very even keeled personality that was the right man on the AFL side to handle the merger talks. From March to April in 1966 the talks snowballed, only hitting a couple of snags when the AFL’s Oakland Raiders was sold to Al Davis and the New York Jets (formerly the Titans) went up for sale. Tex was smart enough not to bring this idea up in front of all the owners; instead he went owner to owner to gain a supporting cast before he presented it to the entire league. The only owners who held reservations about the merger were the San Francisco 49ers owner Lou Spadia and New York Giants owner Wellington Mara. They were concerned about AFL franchises in their own market, which threatened their position and profits. The regional rivalry between these AFL and NFL franchises began to heat up when the New York Giants stole the Buffalo Bills kicker Pete Gogolak in what was essentially the first player to switch leagues in a bidding war not involved in the draft. The Bills and the AFL saw it as the NFL stealing their players and now it would take a little more convincing to merge than they originally planned.

While Tex Schramm started merger talks, the man behind making it happen was the NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. He was the centerpiece behind getting the other NFL owners on board while Tex dealt with going through Lamar who went to the other AFL owners. There was never any formal documentation of how the merger would go down, as most of the talks were done in notations written out in person or by telephone. By June 7th both leagues had agreed to the merger. By now the media had caught up to the secret negotiations that had been taking place and were releasing incorrect stories of what was happening between the two leagues, so the owners needed to come out with a press release of what was happening. On June 8th, a press conference was called on 6th avenue in New York City and the news was made public, the NFL and AFL were merging.[33]

With this merger, the landscape of professional football would change for the better. Pete Rozelle would be the commissioner of the combined leagues and the AFL and NFL would have their own schedules and playoffs until 1970 when the NFL would absorb the AFL and then they would create two conferences – today’s AFC and NFC. The TV deals that NBC had with the AFL and CBS with the NFL would remain, as NBC and CBS would split the coverage of games to broadcast.[34] They agreed that all existing franchises would remain at present sites, and no teams would be dissolved; they agreed that two new additional franchises would be added in 1968, then two more on 1970, two for the NFL and two for the AFL. The NFL would go from 24 teams at the time of the merger to 28 teams after the 1970 season. The growth of 6 new teams was exponentially important for the success of the league. But probably what people looked forward to the most was the leagues would play a world championship game in the upcoming season. The AFL and NFL had never played each other and there was always an unsettled debate as to which league was better, and now that debate would be played out on the field.

With this merger, it was inevitable that a championship game between the two leagues in their newly established league would have to take place. For almost two decades’ discussions of whether the AAFC or AFL could compete with the NFL took away from all three league’s championship games. Now all discussions and arguments would be put to rest and the true professional football champion would be decided on the gridiron, not the newspapers. The game needed a brand, it needed to make a lasting impact, and most importantly it needed a name. Pete Rozelle took up discussions for the title of the game and advised that it be called, “NFL-AFL Championship Game.”[35] While this describes what the game is, the owners knew it needed a catchy, maybe even borderline corny name that would it brand it as the ultimate sports entertainment event. The owners understood the gravity of what this event meant in the spectrum of sports entertainment. Then Lamar Hunt brought out an idea that would gave the greatest game the greatest name it could have possibly asked for. While watching his two kids play with a 1960’s bouncy ball that was called “Super Ball” one evening, it struck him… the game should be called the “Super Bowl.”[36] At first Pete Rozelle refused to title it “Super Bowl” because it wasn’t “appropriately dignified.”[37] But the mainstream media liked the name and used it to describe the first two Super Bowls, but nowhere on the tickets or in any advertisements did the NFL use the term Super Bowl. Hunt jokingly responded to Rozelle’s criticisms by throwing roman-numerals to the end of it, and ever since then, the name and the roman-numerals stuck.[38]

The first installment of the game didn’t take place until 1967, and the game would be slightly marred by a few ‘rookie’ mistakes throughout the contest. When the NFL and AFL merged, they didn’t completely merge; they still only played NFL vs. NFL and AFL vs. AFL in their regular seasons. They both had slightly different rules and even slightly different game balls. So when the Super Bowl pitted the AFL versus the NFL for the first time, there was concern over which rules and game balls would be used. In the inaugural game, whichever team was on offense got to use their game ball, which caused many stoppages when the wrong ball was given to the offense. Further, because the AFL and NFL had their own TV deals, both NBC and CBS didn’t want to give the championship game to the other station so they both broadcasted the game. This created problems when NBC was still on commercial break during the opening kickoff, and the kickoff had to be redone. Also, because the NFL and AFL didn’t want to give home field advantage to the opponent, Pete Rozelle decided that a neutral site would be the best bet to ensure an equal competition.

The first Super Bowl would be played in Los Angeles at the historic Los Angeles Coliseum. The Super Bowl hadn’t yet established itself, so fans from Green Bay and Kansas City (the cities of the two teams participating in the game) didn’t make the trip out west, and the first Super Bowl would be the only Super Bowl in NFL history that didn’t sell out. [39]

The NFL eventually ironed out most of the problems over time, eventually merging both leagues entirely, split into two conferences within one league under the same rules, instead of two leagues in one league with different rules. The Super Bowl has grown in audience, both inside the game and outside the game over the last 55 years, and it continues to grow exponentially from year to year in revenues. The first and second Super Bowls were important in establishing the game’s presence, but it would be Super Bowl III that catapulted the Super Bowl onto the next level of importance and relevance.

In the first two Super Bowls, the NFL’s Green Bay Packers led by Vince Lombardi (the man whose name is now the title of the current Super Bowl trophy) would steamroll the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders. It seemed that the NFL was simply a whole lot better than the AFL’s champion. Super Bowl III seemed to be the same story with different characters. The AFL’s New York Jets were extreme underdogs to the NFL’s Baltimore Colts, by as much as 15-20 points. Just like in 1958 when the league needed a big game to spike it’s popularity, and it got one, the Super Bowl needed a big game and got one. Nobody gave them a chance. A gun slinging, loud, brash, party boy who would fight through hell and back to get to the end zone led the Jets. His name would echo forever in the Hall of Fame, but it has never echoed like it did through the media during the 1960s/1970s.

“Broadway Joe” was his monicker and it aptly described him and his personality, as he was seemingly born to interact with the media. During one of the practices leading up to the Super Bowl, while warming up, he shouted, “The Jets will win on Sunday. I guarantee it.”[40] The ground beneath the media shook. There had been brash stars in this time period, but not in football. Nobody in their right mind would have guaranteed a victory, especially with how big of an underdog the Jets seemed to be, but Joe wasn’t afraid, and he wanted the world to know. Football needed its media star child and Joe Namath was it. Namath went after the ability of Colt’s quarterback Earl Morrall, who had just been a backup playing in Johnny Unitas’ spot while he was unhealthy. He said Earl wouldn’t have been a top 5 quarterback in the AFL, listing off mediocre quarterbacks in his league that would have been better than Earl, even listing his own backup.

The media had never experienced anything like this, the opposing team had never experienced anything like this, it was the beginning of bulletin board material. The type of trash talking that we see every week now in the NFL was brand new back in ‘69. Players didn’t know how to react. Veterans like Morral expressed, “A lot of players have opinions on other players that would send writers running for their typewriters, if they expressed ‘em. But players keep these opinions to themselves -- at least that’s the way it has been. Maybe Namath represents the breed of athletes, the kind of athletes the coming generation wants … I hope not.”[41] Morrall was spot on, hitting the nail on the head. Namath was the frontrunner of youth culture in the NFL, and helped bring the game to the counter-culture youth.

After the Jets won one of the biggest upsets in the history of sports, the landscape of professional football changed. Suddenly the Super Bowl became an event that captured the entire nation's attention. All Americans now knew about the Super Bowl and many noted authorities point to this game on January 12th, 1969 as the reason why. In a way, professional football became the gladiator sport of trash talking, hard hitting players in a fast moving game with colorful and interesting characters, it came to be the counter culture to the traditional slow paced and well behaved and disciplined (for the most part) game of baseball. The New York Daily News editorial wrote about the game, “as long as football is played, that game will be talked about.”[42] This game saved future Super Bowls. Had an NFL team dominated another AFL team for three years in a row, there is speculation that the NFL would have backed out of the merger and left the AFL.[43] This victory for the AFL and the following year when the Kansas City Chiefs over the Minnesota Vikings solidified the Super Bowl as an event that would be a part of American culture forever.

From this game, the Super Bowl has grown to be even more super than the original NFL owners imagined it would become. The social, emotional, cultural, and economic/financial impact this game has on the current United States and beyond our borders is fascinating. The game itself has an impact on football fans, fans of sports in general, and even the non-sports/football fan. Two out of every five Super Bowl viewers isn’t even a football fan.[44] Viewership has grown in every Super Bowl in the following years of Super Bowl III, and the amount of money gained from putting on a Super Bowl is jaw dropping.

The Super Bowl is one of the most capitalist events in the most capitalist society. Host cities of the Super Bowl gain the most out of the event, it is estimated that an average of $200-$300 million dollars gets pumped into the host city during Super Bowl week.[45] This money comes from visitors and residents buying travel plans, hotel rooms, food and beverages in local restaurants, shopping in local stores, and plethora of many other items across the host town.

Then there’s the advertising effect that the Super Bowl has. The Top 10 most watched events on television are Super Bowls, and 18 of the top 20 most watched television events are Super Bowls.[46] Why are television rating so important? Well two things: first, television ratings and the number of people viewing something on television goes a long way in showing you how popular the event is; almost 80-90 million people watch the Super Bowl on television.[47] Second, when there are 80-90 million people watching something on television, marketing firms are chomping at the bits to get a hold of commercial airtime. Super Bowl commercials are easily as important to the viewer, if not more important to some of the viewers. An estimated 58% of people would rather take their bathroom breaks during the game so that they don’t miss any of the commercials.[48] For Super Bowl I in 1967 it cost $37,500-$42,500 for 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl, and by 2012 it cost $4 million dollars for the same amount of airtime.[49] Despite the high cost, there is never a shortage of companies wanting to purchase commercial airtime. The commercial airtime is extremely valuable; it is estimated that companies who bought commercial airtime combined to accumulate $1.72 billion in ad revenue.[50]

The Super Bowl tops all other entertainment events. Research shows that people would rather attend a Super Bowl Party than a New Year’s Eve party.[51] The food consumption on Super Bowl Sunday is staggering. The Super Bowl has an economic in all cities outside of the host city; 58% of Americans will attend a Super Bowl party where food and beverages are consumed, 13% of Americans will order take-out from a restaurant, 9% will go to a restaurant/bar to watch the game, that’s over 160 million people pumping money in local restaurants and grocery stores in cities that aren’t even associated with the game.[52] After all this food consumption, antacid sales will increase approximately 20% Super Bowl weekend.[53]

The social and cultural impact is profound, and the Super Bowl doesn’t stop there. Emotionally the Super Bowl can have a profound impact. In a study conducted by a cardiovascular health research team, the researchers went back to analyze the cardiovascular health of people in the years 1980 and 1984. In 1980 the Los Angeles Rams lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers and in 1984 the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington Redskins. After the heart-breaking defeat to the Pittsburgh Steelers in their fourth quarter comeback in Super Bowl XIV, heart-related deaths shot up 15% in men and 27% in women in the following two weeks compared to the same weeks in 1981-1983.[54] Furthermore, in Super Bowl XVII when the Raiders beat the Redskins, there was no spike in heart related deaths – and heart related deaths in women and people over the age 65 actually dropped.[55] The outcome of the Super Bowl has a profound impact on the livelihood of people and their emotional well-being living in the cities of Super Bowl champions or losers.

The question that should conclude this examination into how the Super Bowl came to be, is why is it so popular and why does one football game have such a large presence in America?) Why do people love it as much as they do? How and why has this country become so infatuated with everything that happens within one game once a year? After all, the game has no ramifications other than a win or a loss. At the end of the day it might just be a silly game to some people but how can a sport that is played professionally in only one continent be so popular? In a poll taken on the most popular sports in the world, soccer (which is played professionally and at amateur levels and adored on every continent and just about every country) takes up 43% of popularity; the NFL is 13% of popularity; and the MLB is only 12% of popularity.[56] While that makes baseball seem not as popular, consider this – baseball is played at professional and amateur levels all across the globe, almost as many as soccer, excluding Europe and Africa; football is played at professional and amateur levels mainly in two countries, the United States and Canada. The Super Bowl is broadcasted in over 220 countries worldwide, [57] while there are only two professional leagues in the United States and Canada that are relevant. Male, female, young, old, American, European, white, black, green, or purple – everyone seems to be intrigued with the game of football. There are statistics that show two out of every five viewers of the Super Bowl aren’t even fans of football and they might not even watch another football game the rest of the year.[58] They do this because they know the Super Bowl, it’s commercials, it’s halftime shows, and everything about it will be the only thing talked about at almost every office across the country for the next three days following the game.

One of the earliest movements that sparked popularity of professional football was the game’s willingness to end the color barrier before any other professional sport. In the 1940s and 1950s, racial tension was intense, and while there have been countless African-American collegiate athletes since the turn of the 20th century, the step to the pros seemed to be one that couldn’t happen for quite some time.

The big difference between collegiate and professional sports is of course that the athletes are paid. Football coaches certainly understood quickly that African-American athletes had the same ability to play the game of football. University administrators might not have wanted black athletes representing their program, but they didn’t have to pay them to represent, and they helped the school win football games. The number of black athletes in college football greatly exceeded the number in professional football, because there were no black athletes in professional football. No team wanted to pay an African-American.

During the 1946 off-season, Los Angeles African-American newspapers and civic groups forced the teams to sign an African-American or they would use their political power to halt the team’s use of city stadiums.[59] It was at this time that the Los Angeles Rams signed both Kenny Washington and Willie Strode.[60] Washington had been a teammate of Jackie Robinson’s (who at this time had not yet made his major league debut, but was in the minor league system) at UCLA.[61] The NFL had beaten the AAFC to the punch when it came to breaking the color barrier in professional football, but the real victory came by way of the Cleveland Browns and their coach Paul Brown of the AAFC. Paul Brown had coached Bill Willis and Marion Motley at both Ohio State and in the northeast Ohio area, and had no doubt that these guys could make a difference for his team. In the same year, 1946, only a couple of months after the Rams signed their players, the Browns signed these African-Americans[62] – but not because they had to, because they wanted to. Strode and Washington hardly saw the playing field for the Rams,[63] while Willis and Motley both started for the Browns and made an impact for their teams. Both players achieved All-League honors in 1946 in 1953 and both were inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame.[64]

While there have been numerous achievements by African-Americans from 1946 to now in professional football, one of the most under looked and lasting impacts was its popularity among African-American fans. Having African-Americans in the game garnered African-American attention outside of the game and there were vast amounts of black fans showing up to games and becoming fans of the game because it was one of the very few professional games that allowed African-Americans. Not only were the fans showing up because there was someone of their race on the field, but they were showing up because the black athletes were as good, and sometimes better than, the white athletes. They became fans because it was something everyone realized African-Americans were particularly good at.

The NFL and the Super Bowl have a presence everywhere. The NFL has become the most popular professional sport in this country without a doubt and a huge part of that is its regular occurrence on television programming almost every single prime-time night of the week. When the NFL explored the options of taking football to primetime back in the late 1960s both NBC and CBS declined the offer, it seemed to be improbable until ABC Sports president Roone Arledge engineered the notion that football could be a huge primetime hit. Monday Night Football first aired on September 21st, 1970 with Joe Namath and the Jets facing the Cleveland Browns.[65]

ABC went all in on the event and while CBS and NBC were using roughly 5 or 6 cameras per game, ABC threw all their chips on the table and went with 9, featuring live-action replay, slow-motion replay, and featured the most famous football broadcaster of the time Howard Cossell.[66] His sidekicks would include some of the most famous (and infamous) names in football like Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, Fran Tarkenton, and OJ Simpson. Even international musicians would want to be a part of the hugely successful program – the week before John Lennon was shot he appeared as a guest in the Monday Night Football booth.

The 2003 ESPN article chronicling the history of MNF gives statistics of the program from 1970 to 2003; in it’s 33rd season of programming at the time it is the longest running primetime show in the history of television, it has been ranked in the top 10 of all primetime shows from 1990 to 2003, with as many as 50 million viewers each week it is the number one show on Monday nights among men and 40% of viewers are women.[67]

The demographics of women and men both watching football in primetime instead regular television programming put to rest any notion that football wouldn’t be able to compete in primetime television. Monday Night Football has been a huge contributor to the success and popularity of the Super Bowl. In 2011, ESPN signed a ten-year extension with the NFL agreeing to pay $1.8 billion dollars to the NFL for 17 Monday Night Football games a year, roughly $105 million per game.[68]

In recent years, the NFL has also implemented Thursday Night Football every week on its own channel NFL Network, which is not nationally broadcasted, but over this past off season it inked a deal with its original TV broadcast partner CBS in a $250 million deal that brought Thursday Night Football to a national broadcast for 8 out of the 16 weeks it is played.[69]

Football is everywhere on almost all major broadcast channels and on almost any night or day of the week. Three out of seven days of the week football is on; Monday nights, Thursday nights, and on Sunday from 1:00 pm to 11:30 pm. The NFL makes roughly $6 billion dollars in TV revenue; $1.9 billion from ESPN, $1.1 billion from FOX, $1 billion from CBS, and $950 million from NBC, and another combined billion from other satellite providers.[70] When billions are being spent to broadcast two-hour long games the networks will do everything within their power to make sure that those games are being watched, and the NFL has never had a problem drawing TV audiences across the country and around the globe.

These games and TV deals are worth so much money because of how much Americans love their violence on television. Football is a violent game. It’s the closest thing Americans can compare to the Roman’s gladiator sports; supreme athletes running across a huge piece of land to do anything within their power to take down the other man in hopes of stopping him from scoring. Their shields are their helmets and shoulder pads, their weapons might as well be their massive strength and will power to beat the guy across the ball from them. Remember when the media and sports were described as “symbiotic”? Well now throw violence into the mix and you have yourself an even deeper symbiotic relationship. Violence antagonizes the viewer to want more, and sports producers know this, so they make sure broadcast emphasizes it and that the cameramen focus in on it.

There have been studies that show viewers enjoy certain plays more than other based on their violence. In a 1981 study done by Bryant, Comisky, and Zimmerman where they show both male and female viewers a regular football play and then a more aggressive football play, the amount of enjoyment in the plays increased as the violence increased and the study came to a conclusion that, “a high degree of aggressiveness is a critical ingredient of the enjoyment of watching sports contests.”[71] From that conclusion it might be easy to assume that if violence is favored, then hockey should be the favorite sport, or boxing and MMA fighting.

The difference between football and the more aggressive sports is that football has its limits on just how violent it can be, they have capped just how violent the game can get and they have even made the game safer from year to year even though the athletes get bigger and stronger year after year. As mentioned earlier the amount of violence needed for a viewer to be interested can be exaggerated, meaning there’s a limit to how much violence is shown before most viewers are drawn away from the action on the field. Maybe people watch football and its violence because of what Plato observed – “Tragedy discharged the excess of pity and fear that built up in individuals.”[72] So watching football and its violence gets that need for something violent and tragic out of your system.

Another key component to the attractiveness is that many people who watch football used to play football. There are currently one million plus active high school football players, making it the most participated sport in this country’s high schools.[73] Of that million there are at most 70,400 student-athletes that get the opportunity to continue their football career at the collegiate level from Division I to Division III.[74] Then there are the select few who make it on NFL rosters, 1,696 players. If there are one million high school football players that means every year, there are one million kids who go out every year on their respective gridirons to prove that they have what it takes to make it to the next level. There’s a certain jealousy that these kids have for the elite that make it to the NFL, maybe that’s why they watch it, out of envy of wanting to throw spirals down the field in the Super Bowl like Tom Brady or Joe Namath, wanting to make vicious hits like Lawrence Taylor or Ray Lewis, wanting to make the game winning catch like Santanio Holmes or make the bruising run into the end zone like John Amechi. Plato states you are what you behold, when you see violence you need violence,[75] so per Plato when you behold football, you are football. And when you play football, you need football.

The game is popular for a multitude of reasons, and professional football certainly stands supreme in the eyes of the American people. Regardless of gender, race, experience or lack thereof, everybody tunes into the Super Bowl and professional football because nobody wants to be left out of the conversation to what 90 plus million people are talking about the week after the Super Bowl. Whether you are at the game, sitting in a bar, or in your living room the game is something everyone wants to be a part of. That’s why football is the most cultural, social, economic and emotional day of the year, every year.

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[1] Edmunson, Mark. "Football Is America's War Game." Los Angeles Times. August 23, 2013.

[2] Edmunson, Mark. "Football Is America's War Game." Los Angeles Times. August 23, 2013.

[3] Craig R. Coenen, From Sandlots to the Super Bowl: The National Football League, 1920-1967. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. 12

[4] Coenen, 13-14

[5] Coenen, 15

[6] Coenen, 83

[7] Coenen, Pg 116

[8] Coenen pg 117

[9] Coenen pg129

[10] Coenen pg125

[11] Coenen pg126

[12] Coenen pg 126

[13] Coenen pg 119

[14] Coenen pg127

[15] Coenen pg 131

[16] Coenen pg117

[17] Coenen pg134-135

[18] Coenen pg 135

[19] Lawrence A. Wenner, Media, sports, & society. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1989. 55.

[20] Wenner, 60

[21] Wenner, 49

[22] Wenner, 49

[23] Mitchell Stephens, "History of Television." NYU.edu.

[24] Landon Y. Jones, "A Booming Baby Explosion." In Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980. 40

[25] Tex Maule, "Here's why it was THE BEST FOOTBALL GAME EVER." Sports Illustrated 19 Jan. 1959: 52.

[26] Allen St. John, The Billion Dollar Game: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest Day in American Sport Super Bowl Sunday. New York: Doubleday, 2009. 67

[27] St. John, 67.

[28] Wenner, 62.

[29] Wenner, 62.

[30] Wenner, 62.

[31] St. John, 69.

[32] St. John, 69.

[33] Schramm, Tex, and Tex Maule. "Here's How it Happened." Sports Illustrated 20 June 1966: 19.

[34] St. John, 76

[35] St. John, 71

[36] Fetter, Henry. "How the Super Bowl Got Its Name: The Real Story." The Atlantic. January 27, 2011

[37] St. John, 71.

[38] St. John, 71.

[39] St. John, 75

[40] Lowell Reidenbaugh. "Super Bowl III: The Broadway Joe Show." In Super Bowl Book. 1984. Sporting News Publishing Company, St. Louis, MO.1984. 34

[41] Reidenbaugh, 35

[42] Stephen Hanks. "Chapter Six: The Post-Game Show." In The Game That Changed Pro Football. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Pub. Group, 1989. 157.

[43] Hanks, 159

[44] Iris Mohr. "Super Bowl: A Case Study of Buzz Marketing." International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, 2007, 33-39. JStor. 37.

[45] Lizzan Flatt. Economics of Entertainment: Economics of the Super Bowl. Edited by Simon Adams and Rachel Eagen. Ontario, Canada: Crabtree Publishing Company, 2013. 19.

[46] Mohr, 37.

[47] Mohr, 37.

[48] Mohr, 37.

[49] Flatt, 32.

[50] Flatt, 32

[51] Mohr, 37.

[52] Flatt, 37.

[53] Mohr, 37.

[54] Matt McMillen. "Super Bowl May Trigger Heart Attacks." CNN. January 31, 2011.

[55] McMillen, Matt. "Super Bowl May Trigger Heart Attacks." CNN. January 31, 2011.

[56] Flatt, 9.

[57] Mohr, 37.

[58] Mohr, 37.

[59] Coenen, pg. 123

[60] "History: African-Americans in Pro Football." History: African-Americans in Pro Football.

[61] "History: African-Americans in Pro Football." History: African-Americans in Pro Football.

[62] "History: African-Americans in Pro Football." History: African-Americans in Pro Football.

[63] Coenen, pg 123

[64] "History: African-Americans in Pro Football." History: African-Americans in Pro Football.

[65] ESPN. "History of ABC's Monday Night Football." ESPN. January 15, 2003

[66] ESPN. "History of ABC's Monday Night Football." ESPN. January 15, 2003

[67] ESPN. "History of ABC's Monday Night Football." ESPN. January 15, 2003

[68] Michael David Smith. "ESPN Extends Monday Night Football Deal Through 2021." ProFootballTalk. September 8, 2011.

[69] Ben Eagle. "CBS Lands Rights to NFL's Thursday Night Football Package." SportsIllustrated.com. February 4, 2014

[70] Eric Chemi. "ESPN Pays Four Times the Going Rate to Air NFL Games." Bloomberg Business Week. August 27, 2014

[71] Wenner, 273.

[72] Wenner, 275.

[73] Terrance Jeffrey. "Football Is Top Sport in U.S.: 1,088,158 High School Players." CNS News. February 2, 2014.

[74] Ryan Wood. "Crunching the Numbers: Football Scholarships." ACTIVE.com.

[75] Edmunson, Mark. "Football Is America's War Game." Los Angeles Times. August 23, 2013.