Next month, more than one hundred million people in the United States will be doing roughly the same thing for a few hours: they’ll be getting comfy in front of a TV to watch athletes run, throw, catch, and—the big one—tackle each other. That’s right, Super Bowl Sunday is coming up on February 5.
It’s the most anticipated National Football League (NFL) game of the season, where the last two teams standing after nearly six months of competition will battle it out to decide who will be champions. For sports fans, the case for the relevance of this game was made by that fact alone.
If you’re a sports fan, you’re already hooked. And even if you don’t watch sports, you may be excited about the Super Bowl parties and all the food you’ll get to eat with your friends and family—you can just ignore the game in the background.
But if you don’t like sports or parties and junk food, why should you care about the Super Bowl?
A closer look at football
To “kick off” the process of opening your heart to the Super Bowl (that’s a football pun, you nonfootball fans), it helps to understand a little about the sport.
Often, football is portrayed as a barbaric sport. Many have labeled the game violent, stereotyped the players as dumb jocks (something that we know isn’t true), and the coaches as angry men who yell and throw their hats when they get upset. But once you get past the clichés, there’s a very complex game.
There may be one ball and one major goal (scoring a touchdown), but football takes lots of people (eleven at a time, to be precise) working together to help each other execute their role over and over again. Teams run countless plays—some teams have prepared hundreds of different plays that all of their players must memorize so they know exactly what to do during the game.
To complicate things further, coaches—and sometimes players—try to predict what play the other team is running and select their own play accordingly. To do that they study what plays their opponents have run before, how the players arrange themselves on the field, the situation of the game, and more. Before they ever step foot on a field, football players have put in hours of work—and that’s not even counting all the physical training.
When it comes down to it, the game is just as much about mental capacity as it is about physical ability. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are NFL players like John Urschel, an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens who graduated from Penn State with a perfect GPA and who is now working on his PhD in mathematics at MIT—while still playing in the NFL.
A score for science
Still not sold? That’s fair. But if you’re interested in science, the Super Bowl may have another chance to draw you in.
Football games are a great place to see the laws of physics at work. Those grown men crashing into one another are a live example of inertia and momentum. And that “pig skin” being hurled through the air—and occasionally being fought over as it bounces unpredictably on the ground—has that odd shape for a reason. Its prolate spheroid design provides a stabilizing effect when the ball is thrown with a spin.
It turns out that, when you look closely, you’ll see that science has left its finger prints all over the game. NBC even has a video series pointing out the science of the sport.
Science isn’t just an observable part of football, though. It’s a tool that players and coaches must use if they want to be successful. Though players aren’t carrying calculators and data tables with them onto the field, their efforts bear more of the marks of the scientific process more than you may have thought.
Take, for instance, the cornerback, a defensive player who must prevent the quarterback (the thrower) from completing a pass to a wide receiver (the catcher). To be a good cornerback, you have to be able to read the flight of the ball, determine its speed and velocity (as well as that of the other players!), and predict what’s going to happen before it does. And you can only do that after a constant process of making predictions, observing, and testing, and then analyzing the results.
The Super Bowl effect
So strategy and science haven’t hooked you? We’ve got one last reason: anything that has such a powerful influence on society is worth at least a second look.
The Super Bowl may have been just a game when the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs suited up for the first one in 1967, but today it’s about much more than football. It’s become an American cultural tradition, right up there with Thanksgiving and Christmas. And like those holidays, it influences the economy, our culture, and the behavior of millions.
Leading up to the game, Americans will buy more food than they do for any other event other than Thanksgiving. Pizza is the most popular food, and companies like Domino’s and Pizza Hut record a vast increase in sales each year. Merchandise sales go through the roof, too. Then there’s the halftime show, where music superstars entertain the masses—no mean feat if their team is losing. But put on a good show, and they reap the rewards: after her performance last year, Katy Perry’s song and album downloads nearly doubled.
Last but not least, the Super Bowl is the event for advertisers. In earlier games, a thirty-second ad cost around $46,000. Now, it goes for nearly $5 million. With so many people watching, companies and organizations know that the commercials they run during the game have to bring just a little bit more to the table, be it humor, nostalgia, or tears. Some Super Bowl commercials have become cultural touchstones that last for years—including the Budweiser frogs, office linebackers, or grandmothers who just want a bigger hamburger.
Watch it, or don’t
Maybe millions of people devoting a whole day to a football game isn’t the best use of time that we could dream up. But, it does provide enjoyment for football fans, and it brings people together—even if it’s only to argue over whether a player’s foot was in bounds or not.
But even if you still have no intention of watching the game, perhaps you’ve been able to see through stereotypes, clear up some misconceptions, and appreciate how easy it is for society to turn something simple into a cultural phenomenon.
Either way, you’re a winner.