Hey, Football Fans!
Over the course of the last 50 years, the Super Bowl has taken the nation by storm! It certainly has become a leviathan of championship sporting events. Baseball may be America’s pastime, but football has quickly become the nation’s most popular sport.
Excited fans have been chomping at the bit in the post-season to see who will face off in this season’s Super Bowl. Now we know the Carolina Panthers are going up against the Denver Broncos today and the excitement is through the roof!
Super Bowl L (or 50 if you don’t know your roman numerals), is bound to be a record-setting televised event! Only seven shows in the history of television have been able to draw in over 100 million viewers: there was the M*A*S*H series finale in 1983 and the other six were all Super Bowls!
Today, the Super Bowl means a packed stadium, extravagant halftime shows, and funnier commercials than you’ve seen all year. But it may surprise you to know that the first Super Bowl was nothing like the Super Bowl that we all know and love today. No, it was VASTLY different…
Empty seats were plentiful, the halftime show was put on by marching bands and flag girls, and the game was broadcast (for the first and only time) by two different networks (CBS and NBC). It’s true! The Super Bowl just wasn’t nearly as big of a deal as it is now.
In fact, the original tapes of the game have been lost forever (recording live broadcasts was quite expensive back then, and so the networks recorded soap operas over their tapes)—that’s how small of a deal the Super Bowl was back in 1967!
With an old recording of the game having resurfaced in a dusty attic in Pennsylvania, the NFL has recently aired it as much of the game as we have (which doesn’t include the halftime show or bits of the third quarter). But it was the very first broadcast of this game in 50 years!
With this recent airing and today being Super Bowl Sunday, the frenzied Super Bowl excitement is more than it’s ever been before! Be sure you enjoy the game tonight and, as always, thanks for reading.
- John