Putting the Super in Super Bowl
by Dr. Gareth B. Lapsang,
Department of Sports Ethnology,
Greater Freelton Area College of Applied Arts and Technology
Super Bowl hysteria is cranking up, providing even more evidence for the theory of sport which we have been developing in the Departments of Sports Ethnology here at Greater Freelton.
In an earler article I discussed the relationship between the interest inherent in a sport and the behaviour of its followers. In general, the less interesting a sport is, the more extreme and noticeable is the behaviour of its fans. The fans compensate for the lack of interest inherent in the sport by creating their own interest. So what does this mean for the Super Bowl?
The Super Bowl is, of course, probably the most overblown sporting event on the face of the earth. Two weeks of media frenzy are followed by fly pasts, salutes to America, fireworks, and a half-time show roughly equivalent in size and scope to D-Day.
That is because after six months of exhibition and regular season football, the fans are bored out fo their tiny little minds. After all, the average NFL game produces all the excitement of about one play a minute. Most of the time during an NFL game is taken up by players returning to the huddle, huddling, and then leaving the huddle to take up their positions. That's why they play most of their games on the most boring day of the week. It makes the game seem more interesting in comparison.
During the regular season, interest in the NFL is also maintained by gambling. If you have money on a game, that makes it interesting, and in fact much of the money bet on the NFL is bet in ways that clearly seem designed to create interest for the bettor. For example, one of the common types of bet on an NFL game is the over-under. You bet whether or not the total points scored in a game will exceed a specified total. NFL bettors are famous for driving that number up as they insist on betting that the total will be over. That way, they can maintain their hopes of winning till the end of the game (or spend the last part of the game exulting about having won). If you bet the under, you can be out of the game, and out of reasons to watch, early.
However, when the teams are down to the final two the chances of finding a legitimate betting opportunity are pretty slim. Furthermore, much of the betting on the NFL is taken on parlay cards, and you can't parlay when there's only one game. A single bet at odds of 9 to 10 is scarcely an attractive proposition for any type of bettor.
And so we have the pomposity, pageantry, and pyrotechnics of the typical Super Bowl. The fans respond by organizing a nationwide bout of hysteria. That way, even if the game is a clunker, as it often is, everybody gets something out of it.
The success of this strategy has not been lost on other important sectors, in particular government. A war on Iraq seems to be President Bush's equivalent of the Super Bowl. The excitement of going to war adds some éclat to the plodding predictability of the Bush the Younger regime.
In many ways the history of Western civilization over the last thirty years is the history of the perfection of marketing. Marketing can now make the boring seem thrilling, and the trivial seem consequential (no names, no pack drill). It does so not through any complex or penetrating assessment of the modern psyche, but apparently by seeing how far one has to go before one can be said to have underestimated the intelligence of the public. Football et circenses is the key to understanding the Super Bowl, penis (sic) et circenses the key to understanding most of the rest of modern life. More on that last assertion later.
Putting the Super in Super Bow; © Coolth, 2003
Posted on January 23, 2003
