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In honor of Super Bowl LVIII, here are 58 (ish) fascinating truths about America's most popular sporting event.
Ever since the 1969 Apollo landing, the coin used for the Super Bowl coin toss has contained a tiny piece of the moon, ensuring that gravity slightly favors the side it lands on. Kickers use their Microsoft Surface tablets to calculate any potential affects on field goal trajectory.
The Lombardy Trophy is made by Tiffany & Co. and costs about $50,000. Deep Blue Something was inspired to write the song "Breakfast at Tiffany's" after their rhythm guitar player's step-cousin had two tackles on special teams for the Super Bowl XXX-winning Dallas Cowboys. At the ensuing after party, lead singer Toby Pipes chugged three bottles of Korbel Brut Rosé and began plucking away on Emmitt Smith's Gibson dreadnought.
Tom Brady's 10 Super Bowl appearances are an NFL record. His 7 wins all came in calendar years where China's Keqiang Index experienced positive growth. As such, President Xi Jinping twice offered Brady full access to experimental genetic engineering technology developed by the People's Republic. The paper trail of these offers leads directly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where a strand of Gisele Bündchen's hair was found in late 2019.
On Super Bowl Sunday, it's estimated that Americans consume enough buffalo wings to line them up end to end and wrap around the Earth's circumference not once, but twice. But here's the weird stat: of all those wings, precisely 17% are left uneaten. Given the earth's circumference of 24,901 miles, those leftovers would stretch a distance of 8466 miles. That's the exact distance from City Hall in Buffalo, New York, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Halftime Show wasn't always so flashy. In fact, the first Super Bowl featured marching band performances from two high schools — one chosen by each team. The Green Bay Packers invited the Doveland High School Walking Ensemble to perform. Why is that interesting? Because this performance is one of the only shreds of evidence remaining that the small town of Doveland ever existed at all. You see, in the early 1990's it mysteriously disappeared from maps of Wisconsin and it has frequently been tied to conspiracy theories surrounding Project Sanguine — a top-secret project proposed by the US Navy in 1968 for communicating with submerged submarines. The system would have required a giant antenna covering two-fifths of the state of Wisconsin (including a footprint over the current location of Lambeau Field).
The Jets won Super Bowl III, confirming Simulation Theory. When asked to comment, Joe Namath kissed me, kidnapped Suzy Kolber, and sped off towards the Mexican border in a white Ford Bronco. Namath was the only athlete included on the handwritten list of Richard Nixon's political opponents. The list was scrawled on a piece of two-ply toilet tissue, hidden behind a West Wing urinal, and discovered by Gerald Ford following a particularly boozy brunch in the spring of 1975.
Lamar Hunt, the founder of the American Football League and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, coined the term "Super Bowl" after being invited backstage at Jerry Garcia's Missouri Municipal Auditorium solo set in 1965.
David Tyree, known for the "Helmet Catch" that helped the New York Giants upset the undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, disappeared in the spring of 2009. He was last seen attending a New Jersey Devils playoff game against the Carolina Hurricanes. He got up to use the restroom during the second TV timeout and was never seen again.
It is tradition among NFL quarterbacks who are appearing in their first Super Bowl to make a pilgrimage to Bart Starr's final resting place at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham, Alabama. Starr quarterbacked the Green Bay Packers to victory in Super Bowl I and II, winning the MVP in both games. Many modern-day quarterbacks believe that rubbing his headstone with their throwing arm will bring them good luck in the big game. This year, Brock Purdy eschewed tradition citing a crippling fear of ghosts.
Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction during the Halftime Show of Super Bowl XXXVIII was a conservative psy-op orchestrated by the religious right. The debacle forced the FCC to adopt stricter broadcast standards for cable TV and satellite radio, policies for which the Evangelical base of the Republican party had been advocating unsuccessfully through most of the early aughts.
No team named after a cat has ever won the Super Bowl. The Bengals (0-3), Panthers (0-2), Lions (0-0), and Jaguars (0-0) are winless in five appearances. Bird teams, however, have faired slightly better. The Eagles (1-3), Falcons (0-2), Ravens (2-0), Seahawks (1-2), and Cardinals (0-1) have four wins in 12 appearances. Neither trend applies to Sunday's matchup.
At around 3:15 AM following her first Eras Tour performance at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas (home of Super Bowl LVIII), Taylor Swift went on a notable heater at a Toby Keith (RIP)-themed craps table inside of Harrah's Resort. She blended in by wearing a fat suit, NASCAR T-Shirt, and adhesive upper lip hair. According to a croupier who requested to remain anonymous, Swift rolled continuously for 126 minutes without crapping out. She made all 6 points multiple times, cashing 500-to-1 fire bets on at least two occasions. After she finally rolled a seven and walked across the street to her deluxe room at Treasure Island, the pit boss and maintenance staff carried the table out back, set it ablaze, and performed a ritualistic Wiccan dance to "Ivy".
Due to his annual contract and lucrative endorsement deals, Patrick Mahomes earns roughly $163,424.66 per day. That means he'll rack up just north of $27,000 during the four-hour runtime of the Super Bowl. At it's current pace, this website will have to outlive the sun to make $27,000.
Patrick Mahomes is seeking his third Super Bowl ring. His brother Jackson pawned the first two to buy rare Funko Pop toys on eBay.
The most expensive tickets for the first Super Bowl in 1967 were only $12. Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly $90 in today's money, a fact that Fox News masturbates about nightly.
The Super Bowl has never been played in a city that doesn't have an NFL team, except for Super Bowl IV which was held on the beach at the Sri Panwa Luxury Resort in Phuket, Thailand. It was Thailand's first attempt to gain international influence through cultural approbation, but it failed miserably when the sandy conditions caused several star players to suffer MCL tears in the first quarter. Thailand quickly scrapped this approach in favor of gastrodiplomacy — opening a House of Siam in every suburban downtown area in North America.
Holy shit, I said I was going to write 58 of these? I have a wife, two kids, and a full-time job. What the hell was I thinking? I need to go brine the chicken to make my world famous buffalo chicken macaroni and cheese this weekend. We're going to have to leave it here. Oops.