Super Bowl

The Super Bowl

In essence, it is just another football game. But to the media, fans, advertisers, and businesses it is much, much more. The Super Bowl is played two weeks after the AFC and NFC championship games, within those two weeks many events transpire. Restaurants and hotels in the area prepare for the busiest week of the year, journalists, radio announcers, and television anchors, all board planes headed for Indianapolis and prepare to cover every aspect of the athletes and coaches lives. Fans stock up on wings, beer, chips, and other waist expanding snacks in preparation for their house parties. The Super Bowl is something millions of people all over the country enjoy, but who actually gets to go to the game? One would think Patriots and Giants fans would dominate the stadium, sporting their teams jerseys, drunkenly yelling profanities at the opposing team and high fiving strangers when their team scores. In reality the stadium is only a quarter way full with true fans, the other half businessmen or wealthy individuals who can afford the minimum $3000 per ticket cost, not to mention the cost of travel, lodging, and food. The Super Bowl, sadly, is something many of us will never truly experience first hand. The closest many of us will get to actually seeing the game and experiencing electrifying atmosphere is when we are standing up, huddled against the television on an exciting last play. To me, it is sad that the Super Bowl has such high ticket prices. One would think enough money (and I mean billions of dollars) is made from advertising and television that the NFL would allow for a fair way of distributing tickets to loyal fans at a reasonable cost. In a perfect world a fan of the team would be able to attend the game without using their entire life savings on a pair of tickets. I think a perfect idea would be to make the Super Bowl free. Fans would enter a lottery, and tickets would be given away at random. Of course there are holes in this theory, some people would likely sell their tickets if they won them, most likely at an astronomically high cost, but the amount of resales would be considerably lower. People who entered the drawing would, for the most part, be people that truly wanted to be there. This way, the father and son of a low class family who watched every game during the year on their twenty two inch television to escape the harsh reality that they might be losing their home any day, would be able to go to the game. And that little kid, although he has never been on a family vacation or to Disney world, would forever remember that day. That is what sports is isn't it, an escape? Instead the stands will be filled with people whose only interaction with football is reading the scores on their Ipad on Monday mornings, who sit there, in Armani suits and Prada jackets, and are more worried about what kind of vodka is in their martini than the score of the game. Sadly, these are the majority of the people who fill the stands.