Are You Ready For Some Football?

Your humble typist covered his first Super Bowl in 1979. Super Bowl XIII. At the Orange Bowl in Miami. Tickets were $30. I sat in the auxiliary press section in the stands. A friend of mine, who had bought a ticket outside the stadium from a scalper for face value, was one row in front of me.

The game was an attraction, not yet a national fascination and addiction. It hadn’t become this bizarre confluence of business and sport and business as sport. There was no internet, no NFL Network. Reporters wrote their stories on typewriters. Typewriters. Imagine that.

Now the game is all-consuming. Electronics companies sell more big-screen TVs for the Super Bowl than for Christmas. A 30-second TV ad is now a tad north of $5 million, a mere 13,000 percent increase from Super Bowl I (which was called the AFL-NFL World Championship). And that game was televised by two TV networks, because one network was contracted with the old AFL and the other with the NFL. Illegal wagering will hit about $4.2 billion on Super Bowl 50.

My friend from Super Bowl XIII won’t be buying a ticket outside the stadium in Santa Clara, California this year. SB 50 is a big deal for historical purposes and is also the first in the Bay Area since 1985. It took the massive financing of a new stadium to get the NFL to return (and this is a recurring theme with the NFL – if you build it, we will come).

On the secondary market, tickets are running in excess of $4,800 (face value is $800-$3,000). Assuming a movie ticket is $12, you could go see Kung Fu Panda 400 times for the same price (if that’s your thing).

You are free to skip the hype of this week. You don’t have to watch the interviews or read the stories. You certainly need not buy a ticket. No matter how much vegetable matter is on the plate, the game on Sunday between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers remains the meaty main course for hundreds of millions of TV-watching fans.

For now, anyway.

Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman