Super Bowl

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Super Bowl halftime show spent its first quarter century as a modest affair built around marching bands and drill teams, closer to a college bowl game tradition than to what the show later became. That changed at Super Bowl XXVII in January 1993, when the NFL booked Michael Jackson for the halftime performance and television ratings for the show itself spiked sharply above the game's own numbers; the league has booked major recording artists for the slot every year since, turning the halftime show into a headline booking that performers now actively compete for.

Commercial airtime during the broadcast followed a similar path from afterthought to spectacle. Advertisers now treat a Super Bowl spot as a marketing event in its own right, commanding some of the highest rates of any advertising slot on American television and prompting companies to produce commercials specifically built to be discussed and shared long after the game ends, rather than simply to sell during it. The game itself has become an unofficial American holiday despite carrying no formal holiday status, reliably ranking among the most watched television broadcasts of any kind in the United States each year it airs, and generating its own secondary traditions, from elaborate party spreads to workplace jokes about absenteeism the following Monday.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Super Bowl exists because of a truce between two rival football leagues, not a single league's championship plan. The National Football League and the American Football League, after years of competing for players and fans, agreed in 1966 to merge into a single league by 1970, and to hold a championship game between each league's own champion in the interim. The first such game, played in January 1967 between the NFL's Green Bay Packers and the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs, was billed at the time as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, a name with none of the branding the event would later carry.

The name Super Bowl is widely credited to Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, who is said to have taken it from his children's Super Ball, a popular high-bouncing toy of the era; the league adopted the name officially only from the third game onward, then applied it retroactively to the first two using Roman numerals, a numbering convention, Super Bowl I, Super Bowl II and onward, that the league has kept ever since even as it has become an outlier among major American sporting trophies and titles. The championship trophy itself was named for Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, who won the first two games, after his death in 1970, permanently attaching his name to the league's ultimate prize.