Interested in watching the Super Bowl this Sunday but hate the actual sport of football? Well, you’re in luck because here are some interesting facts you can throw around at a Super Bowl party which have virtually nothing to do with the action on the field.
Let’s start with the basics. Super Bowl LII will take place on Sunday, Feb. 4, with the kickoff set for 6:30 p.m.
Why Super Bowl LII you ask? Because this is the 52nd Super Bowl, and in Roman numerals 52 is LII. The NFL adopted the system of Roman numerals for the Super Bowl starting with Super Bowl V (five). They actually went back and re-named the first four with Roman numerals after the fact.
The thinking behind using the numerals was, according to the NFL media guide, “ “The Roman numerals were adopted to clarify any confusion that may occur because the NFL Championship Game — the Super Bowl — is played in the year following a chronologically recorded season.”
This year’s Super Bowl will take place in Minneapolis at U.S. Bank Stadium. The site of the Super Bowl rotates every year, and generally, it’s held in a neutral location so no team has the home field advantage. However, the NFL is also in the habit of holding the event in cities that have built a new stadium. That’s why this year’s version will be in the home stadium of the Minnesota Vikings, who just wrapped their second season at Bank Stadium.
You can watch the Super Bowl on CTV here in Canada. This year Canadian viewers will once again be able to catch all the high-gloss American commercials, which had been substituted for Canadian ads up until last year’s Super Bowl. On January 24, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected a request from Bell Canada to stay a CRTC regulation that allowed the US commercials.
During the first Super Bowl in 1967, those 30 second commercial spots roughly $40,000. This year it’s reported that a 30-second commercial spot will run somewhere between $5 and $5.5 million. That’s up from the record of $5 million per 30-second commercial spot in 2016.
The most watched game of all time was Super Bowl LXIV in 2014 between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks. That game drew an average viewership of 114.4 million.
The average Super Bowl game lasts about 3.5 hours, with roughly 20-30 minutes set aside for the halftime show.
This year’s halftime show will feature Justin Timberlake – his first time back since the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” of 2004. During that show Timberlake ripped off a section of Janet Jackson’s outfit revealing her breast to the millions watching and sparking no end of conversation and controversy in the process.
Pink will open the festivities with her rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. The length of each year’s version is also a matter of much speculation. It’s actually one of the more popular wagers you can make on the game as well. The bookies have the current over/under at 120 seconds.
As a side note, the game is actually being played between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles…if you’re into that kind of thing.
