{"id":1285,"date":"2019-02-04T08:00:32","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T13:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/?p=1285"},"modified":"2019-02-05T09:14:33","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T14:14:33","slug":"the-impact-of-the-super-bowl-on-american-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/2019\/02\/04\/the-impact-of-the-super-bowl-on-american-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"The Impact of the Super Bowl on American Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Super Bowl has gone from being more than just an NFL championship game and has evolved into a cultural phenomenon drawing in over 100 million viewers every year. According to Sports Media Watch<\/a>, 111.3 million people viewed the 2017 Super Bowl, and 103.39 million people watched in 2018.<\/p>\n

Seton Hall Associate Sports Management professor Laurence McCarthy said the Super Bowl is a \u201cnonreligious holiday\u201d and football is important in terms of American culture. \u201cIt\u2019s a social event as much as anything else and so people get together,\u201d McCarthy said.<\/p>\n

Sophomore accounting major James Carpenter said that the Super Bowl is now ingrained in American culture and has become a social event for diehards and casual fans of the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cNowadays everyone watches the Super Bowl. You go to a bar, you eat the food, you watch the commercials if you\u2019re not into football,\u201d Carpenter said. \u201cYou just have a good time with your family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sophomore sports management and marketing major Winir Louis also finds that the Super Bowl can be an event for everyone regardless if you follow the NFL. \u201cIf you think about it, football is really only an American sport so it\u2019s kind of the perfect time to be American and hang out with all of your friends, order pizza or wings and things of that nature and just being able to just come together,\u201d Louis said.<\/p>\n

According to Nielson, retailers have cashed in America\u2019s fascination with this game as food and beverage companies have seen a massive spike in sales<\/a> leading up to the event. During the 2017 Super Bowl, Americans spent $80 million on chicken wings, $979 million on soft drinks and $1.3 billion on beer.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou would have seen over the last couple of weeks the number of pizza ads, the number of fried chicken ads, the number of snack food ads [in the market]. That industry obviously gets a huge boost obviously this [past] weekend,\u201d McCarthy said.<\/p>\n

In addition to food the food industry\u2019s sales spike, in 2018 sports economist Victor A. Matheson\u00a0<\/a>reported that the Super Bowl can generate anywhere from $30 million to $130 million for the host city.<\/p>\n

McCarthy said the Super Bowl is an economic bolster for the city hosting the game, \u201cbut then the circus leaves town this morning so it has a short-term economic boost into the Atlanta economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The event has been elevated into a multi-million dollar revenue generator but its popularity can also be tied to the timing of the event. \u201cWe\u2019ve gotten over the holidays, we\u2019re now looking towards the spring and so we have this sort of major lull and here we have [the] biggest sports event of the year and you have 100 million or 111 million people watching it every year,\u201d McCarthy said.<\/p>\n

Even with 100 million-plus viewers tuning into the game in past years, 2019\u2019s match-up between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams scored a 44.9 rating in metered market results<\/a> which is a 5 percent decrease from 2018.<\/p>\n

McCarthy said the decrease in ratings is surprising \u201cgiven that Los Angeles is the second largest market in the country, but the problem is that there\u2019s so much going on in Los Angeles anyway.\u201d He notes that the lower ratings \u201ccould be a residual of the Colin Kaepernick protest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rams are one of the two NFL teams in Los Angeles alongside the Chargers \u201cso they\u2019re not a galvanizing force in that market like the Giants might be here in this particular [New York] market,\u201d McCarthy said.<\/p>\n

According to McCarthy the Super Bowl \u201cthe climax of the football season.\u201d The game is heavily promoted by the league and is a revenue-driver for the host city. An abundance of hype surrounds the event in the weeks leading up to the game, but for sophomore sport management major Robert Musantry, watching the Super Bowl with his fraternity was just fine.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a good gathering, and there\u2019s good commercials so it\u2019s not always about the football game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andrea Keppler can be reached at andrea.keppler@student.shu.edu or on Twitter @keppler_andrea.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Super Bowl has gone from being more than just an NFL championship game and has evolved into a cultural phenomenon drawing in over 100 million viewers every year. According to Sports Media Watch, 111.3 million people viewed the 2017 Super Bowl, and 103.39 million people watched in 2018. Seton Hall Associate Sports Management professor…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4386,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,230],"tags":[91,232],"class_list":["post-1285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nfl","category-superbowl53","tag-nfl","tag-super-bowl-liii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4386"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1292,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions\/1292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/sportsreporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}