The Super Bowl is the National Football League’s championship game, played annually in early February between the league’s two conference champions. Created as part of the 1966 merger between the American Football League and the National Football League, it has become the most-watched sporting event in the US each year.
Hours of research by our editors, distilled into minutes of clarity.
This video traces the Super Bowl’s history from its origins through major games, ads, and cultural moments, offering a comprehensive overview of how the event evolved. Note that the video covers through the 2020 season.
In this podcast episode, former Emmy award-winning ESPN producer Dennis Deninger traces the Super Bowl’s unlikely rise from the AFL-NFL merger era to a national spectacle, explaining how it reshaped advertising, gambling, television, and American culture.
The name “Super Bowl” was coined by AFL founder Lamar Hunt, who casually suggested it in 1966—riffing on his child’s Super Ball toy—after alternatives such as “The Big One” and “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” proved clunky and forgettable. The name was officially adopted for the third championship.
Tracing Super Bowl logos from early, varied designs to today’s standardized look shows how the NFL adapted to shifting design trends, television demands, and brand strategy.
The resource details where each Super Bowl has been played, listing every host city alongside its stadium, and shows how a small group of warm-weather and domed locations came to dominate hosting duties over time.
Legal Super Bowl wagering has grown sharply over the past decade as US states legalized sports betting. In 2018, sports betting was only legal in Nevada and accounted for $158.5M.
Many sports books offer additional prop bets reserved only for the Super Bowl, including the Gatorade color, the length of the national anthem, and more. In 2026, the betting favorite for the Gatorade color is orange.
By 2026, a single 30-second Super Bowl ad is projected to cost $8M. Advertisements for Super Bowl I in 1967 cost from $37,500 to $42,500 for a 30-second spot.
The list highlights ads that reshaped Super Bowl advertising, including Snickers’ Betty White spot, Budweiser’s endlessly quoted “Wassup,” and Wendy’s “Where’s the beef,” showing how commercials became as memorable as the game itself.
During Super Bowl XVIII, Apple aired its dystopian “1984” commercial once to a mass audience, introducing the Macintosh and positioning Apple as a challenger to IBM’s dominance in personal computing.
Art, music, sports, entertainment, movies, and many other subjects—these elements define who we are as a society and how we express ourselves as a culture. Take a deep dive into the topics shaping our shared norms, values, institutions, and more.