Every year, the Super Bowl serves as a defining moment about what is right in the United States.
Inside a Super Bowl party, every viewer may have a different reason to watch the game. Some to cheer on their team, others to debate the commercials, some to awe during the halftime show, capped by a few conformers that watch just because everyone else does. But the entirety of the Super Bowl as the country’s pinnacle event is what brings the nation together.
Super Bowl XLV is no exception. This year’s game features two teams that contrast each other in ownership structure and magnitude of local market, in addition to the ethnicities of the head coaches.
And despite the differences among the teams and viewers involved, Americans are unified through our fascination with a game that transcends sports.
America’s love for football has never more been as accentuated as it is in Super Bowl XLV. The Feb. 6 game takes place in Dallas near a local high school that built a $60 million stadium for its football team last year amid a struggling economic climate.
This magnificent facility will be upstaged by the granddaddy of them all: the Dallas Cowboys’ new $1.2 billion stadium that features its own $40 million JumboTron system.
Speaking of astonishing figures: The Super Bowl generates more overall revenue than the gross domestic product of 25 sovereign nations. Super Bowl Sunday might as well be declared a national holiday. About sixteen million more Americans watched the 2008 Super Bowl than voted in the 2008 presidential election.
The Super Bowl is more successful than any domestic sporting event because it manages to attract the average American as opposed to the average American sports fan.
But this year, popularity among athletes in the game is divided. Ben Roethlisberger’s rumored bathroom behavior has not prevented his jersey from being a top seller among males, though his jersey is void in the top 25 among women fans.
