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Super Bowl Sunday is this weekend, which means millions of people will settle down in front of the television for hours on end, drinking beer and putting all of that weight they started to lose as part of their New Year’s resolutions back on.
This day is epic for football fans as well as those who are not fans-tune in to see the commercials. This is a day of modern American mythology when heroes triumph and losers complain that the referees sucked. While this day is engulfed by its fame, it also generates some of the greatest lies.
According to some superstitious business savvy fans, “If an old AFL team wins the game, the stock market will decline during that calendar year. If an original NFL team wins, the Dow Jones industrial average will rise.” This prediction has proven to be up to 90 percent accurate – as far as the first 31 Super Bowls go – but don’t bet your life savings on it.
Due to teams such as the Denver Broncos and New England Patriots, this figure has dropped to around 80 percent according to economic figures, which hopefully has put this legend to rest. While 80 percent accuracy isn’t anything to sneeze at, we have to consider that this is nothing more than a strange series of events. What possible ties could the Super Bowl have with the stock market?
Another favorite urban legend among the irrational football fans is that “sewage systems have broken down due to the tremendous amount of toilets being flushed during halftime.” There has never been any scientific proof that shows any type of correlation between major sewage systems failing and halftime. The Super Bowl organizers spend millions of dollars trying to get into people’s heads and present them with a halftime they’ll enjoy.
Sure, with Prince leading the halftime show this year there will probably be more people flushing than ever, but this superstition dates back to the 1930s, when sewage lines broke during radio commercials of a popular show. The idea of everyone going to the bathroo – let alone flushing – at once, is nothing more than the playfulness of the human mind at work.
It is also predicted that during Super Bowl Sunday, more women are subject to domestic violence than on any other day. It is believed that women’s groups have spread incorrect data nationwide and that this “day of dread” is nothing more than a hoax. Certain people cited to support this theory such as Linda Grovo of the Boston Globe, who said she had never seen such a study, seem to refute this theory surrounding Super Bowl Sunday. Chances are one who abuses his significant other would do so more often than one day a year.
Even a myth that over 10 million barrels of beer are sold for the Super Bowl has generated skepticism among the leading beer producing companies who say that it’s not only impossible to track beer sales for one day, but if you assume one-third of all Americans drink beer while watching the game, that’s roughly .145 cases of beer for one person to drink.
Though the Super Bowl generates a lot of myths, perhaps some truth lies beneath all of the fizzle generated by Super Bowl madness. A firm known as Kronos, which studies work-force related issues, predicts that roughly 5 percent of all workers will call in with a case of Super Bowl-itis, which seems to be a terrible epidemic with symptoms that include laziness, fatigue and a slight hangover costing companies hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity.
Perhaps it’s about time Congress made the day after the Super Bowl a national holiday? While these legends add flavor to this day, let’s hope that fans can separate the super bull from the Super Bowl.
Justin Chase is a second-year psychology major.
