11 Interesting Facts About the Super Bowl You Didn’t Know
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With the Cincinnati Bengals facing off against the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl 56, we thought it would be fun to look at some of the more interesting facts surrounding the big game.
The Super Bowl brings together the two best teams in football for what usually shapes up to be an incredible game, but the game is only part of the fun. With the addition of an amazing halftime show this year featuring Dr. Dre, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Mary J. Blige, and Snoop Dogg, as well as a number of fun and creative commercials, the Super Bowl is a spectacle that reaches far past fans of football.
So grab your drinks, fill your plate and read on for some incredible facts about the Super Bowl that you can amaze your friends with this weekend during the big game.
Super Bowl Facts You Didn’t Know
1. Tom Brady has the most career touchdowns in Super Bowls in history. Brady has thrown for 21 touchdowns over the course of his career in the NFL. He has appeared in 10 Super Bowls making 421 pass attempts, 277 completions, and 3,039 passing yards. The only other player that has recorded double-digit touchdown passes in Super Bowls is Joe Montana with 11.
2. The Super Bowl uses a lot of footballs. Each team is given 108 footballs to use during the course of the game, 54 of which are to be used during practice and 54 to be used during the game itself. Overall about 120 balls total are used throughout the course of the game and each ball is put together by hand in the United States by Wilson.
Each football that Wilson puts together for the Super Bowl is imprinted with the words “Wilson”, “Commissioner”, and “Made in the U.S.A.”. Wilson has been doing this for every single Super Bowl that has occurred since the very first one.
3. The very first Super Bowl took place on January 15, 1967 between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The game was played at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with the Packers beating the Chiefs 35-10.
Each player on the Green Bay Packers team took home a $15,000 bonus for the win. For comparison, the Kansas City Chiefs, who won the Super Bowl in 2020, took home $124,000 each.
4. While it has been a long time since our hometown team the Chicago Bears have won a Super Bowl, there are 12 teams in the NFL that have never one a single Super Bowl. Those teams include the Minnesota Vikings, Buffalo Bills, Cincinnati Bengals, Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, Arizona Cardinals, Tennessee Titans, Los Angeles Chargers, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars, Detroit Lions, and Cleveland Browns.
The Browns, Lions, Jaguars, and Texas have never even made it to a Super Bowl.
With the Cincinnati Bengals having their best season in a long time, maybe we’ll get to take one of those teams off this list this year.
5. The commercials during the Super Bowl have become almost as popular as the game itself over the years. It has become so popular to advertise during the Super Bowl that it costs around $6.5 million to run a 30-second commercial during the game. Back in 1967, during the first Super Bowl, it costs about $40,000.
It makes sense though considering the Super Bowl is one of the most watched programs on TV.
6. The Super Bowl holds 9 out of the top 10 most watched American television programs of all time. More than 100 million people watch the game each year and it is the second most watched sporting event in the world.
The only non-Super Bowl program to top 100 million viewers was the series finale of the show MASH, which was seen by 106 million viewers. The MASH series finale stood as the most watched television program of all time up until the 2010 Super Bowl between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts which brought in 106.5 million viewers.
7. Halftime performers at the Super Bowl do not get paid for their performance. While there have been reports of artists getting paid to perform, the NFL does not pay the artists any sort of appearance fee to perform. They do however cover all the expenses for the performance production and personnel staffing.
Since the Super Bowl has such high viewership numbers, the publicity alone from performing during halftime can be extremely beneficial to the artists performing.
8. The majority of quarterbacks in Super Bowl history come from the same 11 colleges. Notre Dame, Stanford, and Michigan were tied for the most alumni featured in the Super Bowl as of 2017. Each of these colleges has had 7 quarter backs featured in the Super Bowl while Perdue came in 2nd with six.
9. Joe Montana holds the record for the most combined rushing yards in the Super Bowl with 105 yards. John Elway comes in 2nd with 86 yards. And while Tom Brady may hold the record for most touchdown passes in Super Bowl games, he only has 28 rushing yards in his 10 appearances.
The quarterback that has the most rushing yards in a Super Bowl game is Steve McNair with 64 yards in Super Bowl XXXIV.
10. The NFL has yet to hold a Super Bowl in a host city where the climate is less than 50-degrees Fahrenheit unless the stadium is covered or has a retractable dome. Out of the 56 Super Bowls only 4 of them have been hosted in northern cities and 11 of them have been Miami.
11. Thanksgiving may be the day when Americans eat the most food in a single day, but the Super Bowl isn’t far behind. Super Bowl Sunday ranks #2 in largest day of food consumption in the U.S.
It is said that 1.3 billion chicken wings will be eaten between Saturday and Sunday, 11 million pounds of potato chips, 4 million pounds of pretzels, and 8 million pounds of guacamole. And that doesn’t even include all the other snacks and food you’ll for sure have at your Super Bowl party.
