Americans love the Super Bowl. The TV ratings prove it.
Sunday night’s game was watched by 108.4 million people — making it the third-most watched TV program in U.S. history. The first two? The previous two Super Bowls.
From our vantage point, this U.S. obsession with the NFL’s title game is hard to fully digest. Alabama has no NFL team — and never will, we assume — and is in the heart of college football country, the (largely Southern) region that would rather watch a college game than, well, almost anything else.
Yet, this annual event is unrivaled in nationwide interest. Sure, sometimes the games stink; Sunday’s was a snoozer in the first half. And, truth be told, there’s a sizeable percentage of people who watch the game just to see the commercials. No crime there.
Purists may lament that Super Bowl Sunday is more glitz than gridiron, but that hardly matters. The numbers don’t lie.
