NEW ORLEANS — John Madden once said the biggest gap in sports was the difference between the winner and loser of the Super Bowl. And if you were comparing all of America’s most grandiose sports spectacles, the biggest gap is the one that exists between Super Bowl supremacy and anything else with the audacity to try and come close.
Sting called it “Americana at its most kitsch.” Paul McCartney once remarked, “There’s nothing bigger than being asked to perform at the Super Bowl.” Legendary New York ad executive Jerry Della Femina — the inspiration for the alpha-chauvinistic television drama “Mad Men” — dubbed it “Judgment Day,” adding “[P]oliticians have Election Day and Hollywood has the Oscars. Advertising has the Super Bowl.” Before the Nielsen ratings system existed, the most watched television show in the history of the planet was believed to be the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Now? The top 10 shows in history — and 19 of the top 20 — are all Super Bowls. And the NFL’s pie-in-the-sky hope is that Sunday can somehow break last year’s mammoth all-time record of 123.4 million average viewers. But that may take some serious hype and maybe even a little luck, with last year’s Super Bowl breaking the previous season’s record by a staggering 7.4 percent.
That number was helped in part by simulcasts on streaming platforms, but the biggest boost was that the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers went to overtime — giving the Super Bowl broadcasts an extra timeframe to draw in a larger audience. That said, a league source told Yahoo Sports this week that while the NFL has been conservative about projecting the possible size of Sunday’s audience (partially due to last season’s unexpected surprise spike in viewership), there’s an undercurrent of excitement over Fox’s decision to push the Super Bowl in 4K on its free (but ad supported) streaming channel Tubi, which has more than 97 million monthly active…
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