The Super Bowl is it’s own weird holiday. For the most part, only a few people are going to have a horse in the outcome of the football game. Not that the culmination of the NFL season isn’t worth a watch for football fans, it commanded this year an impressive 112 million viewers. This is several times higher than even the most watched NFL games during the regular season. It has transcended a mere football game into a holiday.
It’s a purely secular holiday at that. No trace of ancient religious piety is anywhere to be found. Nor is it the celebration of some great event of significance to the community at-large, such as Independence Day. Its ethos is pure hedonism, and it’s genesis is quintessentially American. At first, the men gathered with their friends to watch football on network television. Women have of course been the reluctant demographic, as a whole, to join in on the fun. Corporate America gradually found the advertising potential of the day more and more valuable. Corporate America cannot leave well-enough alone. It’s not enough for nigh every man in the country to watch your ads. Women have money they need to be spending too! Trying to get women to like football would be a daft waste of effort at best. But they don’t need to like football; they just need to watch the screen. And they don’t even have to watch the football parts.
The compromise was the halftime show: a revelry of pop music. If it’s enough to get women to tolerate the rest of the game, that’s enough. Helping the advertisers is the momentum of the say itself as a quasi-holiday. Stereotyping the sexes aside, families really do try and bond during holidays, and as time has gone by, the Super Bowl has been evolving as a good pretext to spend time with the family. As long as the hours aren’t unbearable, the networks can hold down a hell of a wide audience.
Compounding this cohesion is another feedback loop: the commercials. As the day becomes a bigger ad sale day, companies step up their game–or at least have convinced the public that they are. The imperial-hopefuls of the corporate world spend lavishly to make sure the masses know they are sponsoring these games. Serendipitously for the producers, the crème de la crème of ads integrated themselves into the holiday cult. Non-football fans have another pretext to join friends and watch the game. “I’m just watching it for the commercials.” People say this without a hint of sarcasm. It is a point of pride in some folks, even. With as much command as the Communist Party still has over China, the political elite would absolutely kill for that kind of response from their populous. The most desperate dictators in history could not force such alacrity for consumer demand. But here in the States, we want this ourselves. It’s terrifying and impressive, and a significant reason why the US is the world’s top economy.