A Story, the Dollars, and the Numbers of a Not-So-Super Super Bowl

by Bob Sparrow

If you thought Sunday’s rather boring game was about football, you’ve got another think coming. The game should be called Super Buck instead of Super Bowl.  Super Bore might be a better name for Sunday’s game. The ads and who’s in the stands and maybe the halftime show were more entertaining than the game. So lets talk about the money, who’s watching, and then a story about a long-forgotten Super Bowl hero.

Show Me the Money

• The lowest Super Bowl ticket was priced at $4,750 and the most expensive at $17,842, NOT INCLUDING FEES!
• The last ten 30 second ads average $7m sold by Fox, and reached a record $8,000,000. 
• With last year’s Super Bowl going into overtime, it was estimated that CBS earned $695 million in ad revenue for that one game!
• Tom Brady, who never fails to mention that he played in 10 Super Bowls, won 7, and this year appeared in his first as an announcer, has a 10-year contract worth $375 million!  He’s way overpaid, in my opinion.
• By hosting the Super Bowl, New Orleans received an economic boost of over $500 million
• Each winning team member will take home $164,000, the losers will have to get by for the day on $89,000
• According to SB Nation, the league finally gave up its tax-exempt status in 2015, after over 70 years of being on the books as a “nonprofit.” Really??!!!

Why do people watch the game?

• 43% say the game is the most important part
• 19% say the halftime show is most important
• 17% say the TV ads are most important

The Taylor Swift Effect

          Last year, 58.8 million women watched Super Bowl LVIII, which was a record high. This was 47.5% of the total audience, also a record high.  It’s informally called ‘The Taylor Swift Effect’.

OK, enough of the numbers, the next story is, in my opinion, one of the most memorable of all Super Bowl stories, and it happened in the very first Super Bowl.

The first Super Bowl was in 1967 between the Green Bay Packers and, who else, the Kansas City Chiefs, in the Los Angeles Coliseum.  The night before the game, two Packer players known to have a cocktail or two, Paul Hornung and Max McGee, broke curfew and went ‘out on the town’ with two flight attendants.  Hornung had a pinched nerve in his neck and knew he would not play in tomorrow’s game.  McGee, a veteran player in the last season of his career, was a backup receiver who had only caught four balls all season and would retire after the game.  Max rolled in on the morning of the Super Bowl at 6:30 and ran into quarterback Bart Starr in the hotel hall, who remarked about Max being an early riser!  Before the game, in which Max planned to sit on the bench and nurse his hangover, he told the starting receiver, Boyd Dowler, “You better not get hurt, because I’m in no shape to play.”

As fate would have it, Dowler got hurt early in the first quarter of the game, so Max McGee grabbed the nearest helmet, which happened to be a lineman’s helmet with a fairly large cage on it, and entered the game.  He makes a one-handed catch for the Super Bowl’s first-ever touchdown and ends up making seven catches for 138 yards for two touchdowns. The Packers handily beat the Chiefs 35-10. Seems similar to this years’ game.

Hope you had as good a time as Max McGee did, both the night before the game and during the game!