After a grueling [1] season, the stage is set for Super Bowl LVII (57). The Kansas City Chiefs will play the Philadelphia Eagles on February 12, when one team will emerge victorious as the NFL’s best.
The Super Bowl is usually the most-watched television event in the United States each year and is one of the world’s most popular annual programs. The game itself, however, is rather ordinary compared to everything that accompanies it. The rules are the same, as are the lengths of the quarters and the size of the field. What makes this game different from the 556 preceding ones is everything that happens around it.
If there were a single word that best describes the Super Bowl, it would be exorbitant, meaning unreasonably high. The most obvious reason why exorbitant is such a great word for the Super Bowl is because of the cost of, well, everything. Tickets to the game routinely cost over $6,000 USD, while the price tag for 30-second commercials nears $7 million USD—each.
The halftime show, a roughly 15-minute musical performance by some of the world’s largest stars, is totally exorbitant in both cost and pizzazz [2]. Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s performance for Super Bowl 54 reportedly cost $13 million USD and featured great light displays, dozens of fantastic dancers, and large set designs. Sometimes, the halftime show is more entertaining than the game, and many fans tune in just for the performance—in 1993, Michael Jackson enjoyed a nearly two-minute standing ovation [3] before he started singing, showing how anticipated a performance can be.
Another reason the Super Bowl is exorbitant is fanfare [4]. In the United States, Super Bowl Sunday is the second-highest day of food consumption of the year behind Thanksgiving, a holiday based around dinner. Additionally, tens of millions bet real money on the Super Bowl—in 2022, 31.4 million people placed bets totaling some $7.61 billion dollars. Bettors wager the final score, MVP of the game, and even which color Gatorade the winning team is drinking (orange currently has the best odds of winning at +200).
So, yeah, the Super Bowl is exorbitant.