Monday Night Football has been around for many years, and as any follower of the sport knows, it leads to the playoffs and of course, the Super Bowl. Today, we are sharing a brief history of the event with our residents here at the Windsong Place Apartments in Williamsville, NY prior to the festivities taking place on February 4th in Minnesota.
The Super Bowl is arguably “the biggest sporting event in the country.” While it is younger than the World Series, the Masters, or even the Kentucky Derby, the NFL championship game has become, “a virtual national holiday in which the life of the country comes to a full and complete stop.”
Originally, the Super Bowl began as a rivalry between the National Football League (NFL) and the American Football League (AFL), an upstart league begun in 1960 by a group of businessmen who wanted their own pro-football franchise, negotiated a merger between the two. The game was pitched as a way to determine which league was king in the meantime. The inaugural game was set for 1967, and sportswriters started to call it the “Super Bowl” — a temporary moniker which stuck.
The first Super Bowl was played between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs, the Chiefs winning the televised game, which was broadcast to 65 million viewers (the largest audience ever for an American sporting event). After the merger took place, the NFL was reorganized into two conferences, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC) which play their season separately, the winner of each goes to the Super Bowl.
Since then, the game has gained in popularity, and hype through the years to become the celebration we are familiar with today, complete with award-winning commercials, and star-studded halftime shows. This year, Super Bowl LII will take place in Minneapolis, MN and Justin Timberlake will headline the halftime show. Of course, the audience will be awaiting the commercials too!
To stay up-to-date on what’s happening leading up to Super Bowl LII, keep tabs on the official NFL Super Bowl website: NFL.com where you’ll find access to scores, schedules, league news, videos, stats, and fantasy football. We hope you enjoy the big game this year! Thanks for reading today’s blog post.
