Super Bowl Tickets: Fans Are Angry About Tickets

The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the highest level of professional American football in the United States, culminating a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather than the year in which it is held. For example, Super Bowl I was played on January 15, 1967, following the regular season played in 1966, while Super Bowl XLV was played on February 6, 2011, to determine the champion of the 2010 regular season.

The game was created as part of a merger agreement between the NFL and its then-rival league, the American Football League (AFL). It was agreed that the two leagues' champion teams would play in an AFL/NFL World Championship Game until the merger was to officially begin in 1970. After the merger, each league was redesignated as a "conference", and the game was then played between the conference champions.

The day on which the Super Bowl is played is now considered a de facto American national holiday, called "Super Bowl Sunday". It is the second-largest day for U.S. food consumption, after Thanksgiving Day. In most years, the Super Bowl is the most-watched American television broadcast; Super Bowl XLV, played on February 6, 2011, between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers, became the most-watched American television program in history, drawing an average audience of 111 million viewers and taking over the spot held by the previous year's Super Bowl, which itself had taken over the 1 spot held for twenty-eight years by the final episode of M*A*S*H.

The Super Bowl is among the most watched sporting events in the world, primarily due to mostly North American audiences, and is second to football's UEFA Champions League final as the most watched annual sporting event worldwide. Because of its high viewership, commercial airtime during the Super Bowl broadcast is the most expensive of the year. Due to the high cost of investing in advertising on the Super Bowl, companies regularly develop their most expensive advertisements for this broadcast. As a result, watching and discussing the broadcast's commercials has become a significant aspect of the event. In addition, many popular singers and musicians have performed during the event's pre-game and halftime ceremonies because of the exposure.

The name derives from a college football game which started in Pasadena, CA in 1902, was subsequently named the Tournament of Roses, and which moved to the Rose Bowl stadium in 1923. The Pasadena stadium was called "Rose" because it was built to host the Tournament of Roses football game, and "Bowl" because it resembles a bowl. Demonstrating confusion between its venue and the contest itself, the Tournament of Roses soon became known as the Rose Bowl.

Exploiting the popularity of the Rose Bowl stadium and the college championship game of the same name, the Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl football games were created in 1935, followed by the Cotton Bowl in 1937 (at a bowl-shaped stadium called the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas). "Bowl" thus became a standard term, and other "bowl games" were created in later years. The NFL championship started in 1967 when the bowl games were already well known to football fans. The NFL championship was casually dubbed "Super Bowl", not only because "Super" would indicate the biggest bowl of all, but also because of literary consonance with the term "Super Ball" (a popular toy for children by manufacturer Wham-O). AFL co-founder and Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt helped convert the nickname into the official name by 1970 (the fourth playing of the NFL championship).