Super Bowl XLV: fun facts about food, football, and ads

You may notice the streets will be exceptionally quiet this superb 'ol Sunday afternoon, with perhaps only a few pizza delivery vehicles passing by, as Americans gather en masse around the big screen to watch our annual football, food and advertising spectacular: Super Bowl XLV. Two storied teams from the heartland - the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers - will take the field to conclude an exciting and, at times, controversial NFL season. We can only hope the quality of the game will live up to the stage and hype.

A few fun facts to keep in mind for this Sunday's big game (6:30pm ET on FOX, btw):

• The Steelers have played in seven Super Bowls, winning six of them, while the Packers have been four times, winning three. (It should be noted that the Packers have won 12 total "World Championships" of professional football, eight coming before the modern NFL's playoff system)
• The Super Bowl attracts a ginormous television audience that, according to Nielsen Co. peaked last year at 106.5 million viewers, topping the 1983 finale of "M-A-S-H" to become the most-watched show in U.S. television history
• Nine out of 10 of the most-watched television shows of all-time were Super Bowls, but according to The Wall Street Journal, of the several hours of Super Bowl programming including the game itself, only about 11 minutes will have game action, when the ball is actually in-play
• According to the Hass Avocado Board, an estimated 69.6 million pounds of avocados are expected to be consumed during the Super Bowl, and in general, Americans will eat more on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day besides Thanksgiving, spending over $55 million dollars on food
• Sunday will be among the top five pizza-ordering days of the year, with some chains accepting pre-orders for pies. Papa John's is estimating they'll travel 300,000 miles in total for deliveries.
• This will also be the first Super Bowl with no cheerleaders (!), as neither the Packers nor Steelers have squads

And of course, the Super Bowl is an advertising bonanza, with many people tuning in to see the celebrity-laden ads with absurdly high production values as much as to see the game. Besides paying to produce the ads themselves, advertisers are buying airtime from FOX at a rate of around a whopping $3 million for every 30 seconds, according to MSNBC.

Is it worth it? This is a question that you can help settle, by going to our Ad Blitz channel on Super Bowl Sunday to watch and vote on Super Bowl commercials. We'll be adding commercials from participating in-game advertisers to the channel as-close-as-possible after they air, so you can watch, compare, and vote on ads to your heart's content. Your voting will help determine the champion ad, which will be rewarded with a placement in our homepage masthead ad unit, along with the four runners-up, on February 19.

If you're looking for last-minute, Super Bowl party planning tips or recipes, you can check out the channel now for a variety of Super Bowl coverage, including this awesome recipe for Clams Casino Dip, from Foodwishes:

You can also access the channel and commercials from your web-enabled mobile device: go to m.youtube.com/adblitz from your mobile browser (or enter "youtube.com/adblitz" and you should be redirected).

Enjoy the game!


Andrew Bangs, Sports Manager, recently watched “Queensryche - Silent Lucidity.”