For 50 years, it has been a de facto national holiday.
Well, perhaps not quite that long. The first Super Bowl, the AFL-NFL World Championship Game held in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs on Jan. 15, 1967, was as notable for more than 30,000 empty seats as for any plays on the field.
That may have been due, a local editorial opined, to the “exorbitant” $12 charge for a ticket.
Times have changed. As of Friday afternoon, Stubhub listed 1,547 tickets available for the game in Houston, starting at $3,391 for the cheap seats.
The game’s status today – the biggest single contest in the American sports calendar – is unchallenged, despite the fact that many Super Bowls have been lousy games. While several matches in the past 20 years have bucked the trend, the Super Bowl was once notorious for games that ended as one-sided routs, as our Denver Broncos – their hard-earned Super Bowl XXXII, XXXIII and L victories aside – can attest.
The Super Bowl remains the one football game that even staunch football detractors will tune in for ... for the advertisements, for the halftime show and for the holiday atmosphere at private gatherings, sports bars and taverns nationwide.
In fact, this year, Heinz is backing an effort to formalize that holiday spirit with a petition on change.org to declare the Monday after each Super Bowl an official federal holiday called “Smunday.” The condiment giant has taken the first step by announcing that its salaried employees can skip work on Feb. 6.
According to Heinz, more than 16 million people in the U.S. call in sick the day after the game, which results in a productivity loss of $1 billion. The ones who do show up, the company says, “are just plain cranky.”
Why not extend the holiday atmosphere and make Monday super as well?
Some cynics have pointed out that Smunday is simply clever marketing by Heinz, which has declined to pay the steep rate for a Super Bowl ad this year.
Hard to blame them, as according to Variety, Fox is charging in excess of $5 million (on average) for a 30-second spot on the broadcast. Pittsburgh-based Heinz just missed out on some home-team advertising synergy when the Steelers fell just short of making the big game, losing to the New England Patriots 36-17 in the AFC Championship Game.
The bid for Smunday is not without precedent. In 2014, St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch launched a petition drive to make baseball’s opening day an official holiday. The proposal received much support but eventually failed. Ironically, it was some of the biggest baseball fans who were adamantly against it.
Pundit George Will, a lifelong baseball fan, objected because the holiday would take all the fun out of cutting classes or skipping work to catch the season’s first game. “I’m not sure I ever went to school on Opening Day,” he said.
We are not prepared to weigh in on the Smunday debate at this time, nor do we claim any insight as to whether future-Hall-of-Famer Tom Brady and the Patriots will win their fifth crown or be upset by Matt Ryan’s high-flying Falcons.
We are calling for something rarer: an enjoyable Sunday break from this season of contentious political squabble.
That would really be a holiday.
