Citation Needed - The Super Bowl

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

The Super Bowl is the annual league championship game of the National Football League (NFL) of the United States. It has served as the final game of every NFL season since 1966, replacing the NFL Championship Game. Since 2022, the game has been played on the second Sunday in February. Prior Super Bowls were played on Sundays in early to mid-January from 1967 to 1978, late January from 1979 to 2003[a] and the first Sunday of February from 2004 to 2021. Winning teams are awarded the Vince Lombardi Trophy, named after the eponymous coach who won the first two Super Bowls. Because the NFL restricts the use of its "Super Bowl" trademark, it is frequently referred to as the "big game" or other generic terms by non-sponsoring corporations. The day the game is held is commonly referred to as "Super Bowl Sunday" or "Super Sunday".

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a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath and... With that! From the commercial, from the Super Bowl commercial.

And for this discussion of elite football, I'm joined by a pee-wee football vass. veteran, a larper, a guy who avoids playing catch of anything by always carrying food in both hands at all times, and a guy who joined the practice squad and dressed for one game in high school in a desperate failed attempt to earn his father's love. Noah Cecil Tom and Eli. Yeah, my early love for being an asshole made me great at running away from much larger kids. Hey, I catch food too. I catch hot dogs with my face like that meme girl. Oh, nice. I'll remember. that. All right, all right, Heath. Let he, without a traveling ham, cast the first stone.

Yes. And for the record, it was middle school, and I wouldn't have bothered if I'd known he was going to die so early. Oh, my God. Ten years of love? He's nothing. I almost described it with the death, but I like, you brought it in. I found it. I know what you were sending up, baby. I'm right there. Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? We're going to be talking about today. Super Bowl. Okay, so what is the Super Bowl? It's a game that the Jaguars didn't want to play in any way.

Probably, they had all this shit going on this weekend. You know, like the important fucking family shit with their families. Their families, sure, sure, no, I get it. You want to just try it one more time? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so yeah.

So the Super Bowl is the championship game for American football, which, because of the league's adherence to a conference system that hasn't really mattered since the mid-70. only occasionally features the two best teams in the sport. And it's so popular that 19 of the 20 most watched television broadcasts in American history were Super Bowls. And then there's the fucking last episode of MASH sitting there at 13, like a fucking penguin in a sauna. By the way, for those laboring under the delusion that the Super Bowl is the most watched television broadcast in the world, I would like to quickly remind you of the existence of cricket, China, and the thing the rest of the world

calls football. Okay, but I still think they're making a cricket to fuck with us, right? Thank you. Yes. Everything I learn about cricket feels like a lie that's being doubled down. Yes, exactly. Yes, Eli, hard agree. I mean, an insect the size of a penny that can rub its legs together, make a sound as loud as a hundred decibels. Okay, that's also bullshit. Yeah, I'm with you. No way. Cricket feels like it's just made up by kids along the way. Right. Yeah. Every rule. Yep. So, okay. So, we're obviously talking about. this today because this Sunday, the... To be inserted later.

Anyway, so... Sorry, it needed the 3B. I know, Tom wasn't going to do. Out of politeness, Tom was not going to do the 3B, but it did need... No, it needed to be there. Jimmy! Oh, the 4B is always...

Four beats too many, see? Anyway, so we're obviously talking about this today because this Sunday, the... To be inserted later, will be taking on the... to be inserted later in Super Bowl 60. You coward. Just call it right now, you coward. Call it.

Call it. All right. Well, it doesn't fucking matter is going to be losing to the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl 60. But don't worry. You don't have to give a shit. Well, yeah, it's going to be the Pats, I guess, with next up. But it's okay. You don't have to give.

Can you guess when we recorded this, folks? But hey, hey, so for all of you who I've completely lost, it's so fucked up that I have to do all. of this right before my lead-in sentence of like, you know, hey, it's not going to be all about football nerd shit right after we just nerded out about football. But I'm not going to get as bad as we get when

we're torturing Eli and Tom between records in this essay. Instead, we're mostly going to be talking about how the Super Bowl came to be and why it has such a stupid name. Yeah, you hear that, Tom? It's not going to be boring. It's about entomology. It is fun.

Jimmy Cricket. In fact, a cricket's can be used as a sort of thermometer. the warmer it is, the faster they chirp. I love entomology, Eli. Also, etymology is good. Less cricket stuff, though. Yeah, not as much cricket stuff, yeah. You can tell because they're not chirping at all right now, so it's like really cold out.

The only chirping is the chirping after my jokes, but. Oh, wait. Hey, me. Jiminy. So. That was my soundboard for 2026, everybody. I used my. Noah takes a bunch of equipment out of my office.

now. It's a whole company trip, but it was worth it. No, you get one. That was your one. Okay. So, our story begins in 1869 when a bunch of people at Rutgers in Princeton did a thing that looks nothing at all like American football, but

is considered still the first American football game. In this game, there were 25 players on each side. The ball was round, and the only rule basically was that you couldn't carry the ball. So it was like soccer, except there was also ball punching and a much bigger emphasis on tackling.

But much like a game of Calvin Ball that Calvin's losing, the rules kept morphing until around 1906, you end up with at least a vague semblage of what we now call American football or gridiron or, as I will, for the remainder of the episode, with apologies to our international listeners, football. Yeah, so soccer does have tackling too, but it usually leads to a player fake screaming in pain and then grabbing the wrong part of his body that never got touched and doing like 12 to 15 barrel rolls on the ground while the screaming happens. If I ever see 90 minutes, like a whole game of soccer without that, I'll call soccer

whatever you want. Yeah, in American football, we never admit when someone's injured. It's pretty cool. Right? Thank you. You play through until your murder, suicide. Exactly. Jesus.

Oh, my God. But because the primary activity in football was hitting each other, the sport quickly caught on with Americans, and soon high school teams were popping up and kids were playing in empty fields and sandlots and grown men that wouldn't be allowed to hug for another hundred fucking years. We're using it to alleviate their desperate need to be touched by another man, you know? What are you talking about? There's tons of photos of old-timey guys hugging their best friends, just arm around each other's waist. Oh, never mind. You remember that gay people exist again? I did remember that gay people exist again. I'm so sorry. It's

periodically. Now, so, okay, so, but at the, at the, at the, at the, This time cities did have football teams sometimes, but it was just like all the guys in our city who like to play football, right? Admittedly, that still sounds like what the Raiders did. Okay, fair enough. Yeah. So, but they would just play against, you know, all the guys from some other city. Nothing about it was remotely professional. But inevitably, some people took these informal teams way too seriously.

Coffee that be pickleball. Yeah, right. you. Eli said me at pickleball. He did. He did. He did. In between coughs. But that leads to the first instance of a person getting paid to play this game in November of 1892, a dude named, and you can check the fucking Wikipedia article if you don't believe me. Pudge Hefflefinger. Phenomenal. That was paid $500. That's the entire reason I'm doing this essay. Which is better? Pudgeal Heffer Finger. Like, which is the better one? You just can't even pick one. Mr. Heffle finger.

Like Pudge, Heffel and finger, all three. You were good at throwing your body at other people's bodies so quickly when you're What do you do as a Heffle finger? Like, does Professor help the situation at all? Not if you first name's Pudge. That's Mayor Hufflefinger to you. Imagine you're in the hospital and Dr. Pudge Heffa finger watching it.

I'll wait until it turns around in 18 hours, right? Unless I'm in that weird genre of sex slash medical comedies that the Brits did between like 1973 and 1975, I'm up and out. I'm walking out like Neil Green. But old

Pudge Heffel finger. He was made $500 to play a game for the Allegheny Athletics Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. And I know that seems like a small amount of money, but I want to remind you, we're talking about 1892. That's over $17,000 in today's money. Okay, yeah. So if that's a three-hour game, he made about $5,700 an hour. That's pretty solid.

But just a reminder, the New York Jets paid Aaron Rogers $3.3 billion an hour in 2023 for his 40 seconds of total playing. So that's fun. Also, they probably had to pay for his dolphin sex workers. We had the knee injury after that, too, so it's a little more. Okay, yeah, but there's an old lady now remembering her misbegotten youth, jerking off dolphins high on LSD and feeling pretty vindicated by that joke. Right. Yeah, she should have stayed in it. Tom's mom.

She killed the dolphins. All right, so a few years later, that same Allegheny Athletics Association would go pro. By 1896, its entire roster consisted of paid players who would then go on to just presumably whipped the ever-loven shit out of just the 11 biggest dads in Massapagua or whatever. But by the 19-teens, there were enough pro teams to form into an entire league. So in 1920, 14 teams got together and formed the American Professional Football Association, which would go on to change its name to the National Football League two years later. Yeah, that was the first year.

They had someone on staff who could read. So that's what they ended. Yeah, right. It took a little while. now the official roster at this point it looks like one of those memes where they'll like just you know like hand a hungarian guy all the NFL logos and ask which teams they're from so here's the 14 originals that they included the acrin pros the buffalo all americans the canton bulldogs the racine cardinals the chicago tigers the cleveland also tigers fuck you we had the name first really yep yep the columb the columb the columbia panhandles, I want to remind you that Columbus is the dead center of a panhandleless state. They just really enjoy that part of the pain. Yes, yes, right.

And begging. They also like begging. It could be begging, yeah. Yeah. We also have the Dayton Triangles, the Decatur Staley's, the Detroit Heralds, the Hammond Pross, the Muncie Flyers, the Rochester Jeffersons, and the Rock Island Independence. The Dayton Triangle is like the Bermuda one, but it was J.D. Vance's state. So the only unexplained disappearances are couches and backbones.

Right, yeah. Yeah, and also Peter Thiel's ancestors bought them that too. Right, yeah. That's about right. So if you were paying attention, you might have noticed a couple things about that list. The first is that very few of them correspond with existing NFL teams. In fact, only two of the original teams survived. The Racine Cardinals are now in Arizona, and the Decatur Staley's moved to Chicago

where they became Cecil's beloved Chicago Bears. But the other thing you may have noticed is that all of those cities are pretty close together, right? It's all just the Midwest and New York. Hell, more than a third of those teams are in Ohio. So, yeah, right? Thank you. I agree. So National Football League was aspirational at the time.

Wait until you hear who plays in the World Series, Noah. Yeah, right. So America again. Now, as you may have guessed, based on the fact that 12 of the original 14 teams, went under. Professional football wasn't doing great in the early days. Baseball was the most popular sport in the country by a margin that seemed impenetrable. And to the extent that people could be bothered to give a shit about football, they cared about college football. Pro football was viewed a lot like we might view fucking pro beer pong today or the way that most people in

the U.S. view e-sports. Yeah, the college circuit for beer pong, it just has way more heart. You know what I mean? Like, they're more into it. Even with all the way that, you know, the new NIL money. You're right. Because the booze still affects them, right? They're still drunk. Yeah. So, but suffice to say that in the early decades, even championship teams were usually

losing money. Owning a football team was more of like a prestige hobby for millionaires than an investment. Yeah. Okay. I just, I wonder how pissed the owner of the senators was when he found out he bought a hockey team. Right. God, that's depressing.

Okay. But somehow the league trudged on, even through World War II, when so many players were drafted into the armed forces that teams had to combine rosters creating unholy alliances, like when the Steelers and Eagles played a season as the Stiegles. That's real.

Or the following year. They called it the Stegles. They called it the Stegles. Did they redesign the uniform? Like, which one? I don't know. Like, I don't know if that a Stigle on the hammer. Stiegle,

Stegle, man. Or something. Yeah, right. But then, look at those low rates. The following year. but it got even worse the following year Pittsburgh combined with the by then Chicago Cardinals

for a team that would be listed in the papers as Card Pitt and then unofficially referred to by everybody who liked the sport as the carpets but right but then along came TV now so the traditional wisdom goes something like this football is better on TV than baseball baseball is better on radio than football so when TV took over from radio as the way that sports were most often consumed, football kind of naturally took over as the most popular sport. The truth is a lot more complicated than that. First of all, with early TV, you couldn't tell what the fuck was going on on a football field,

right? You couldn't pick out the action. Baseball was far easier to see and discern. And it even comes with built-in commercial breaks every inning because it's slow as fuck. But what actually happened is that baseball owners were scared shitless of TV. right? When they tried putting games on TV, ticket sales at the ballpark plummeted, and that's where the team owners made most of their money back then, so they resisted it. Football didn't look better on TV so much as it embraced TV sooner. It was also small enough at the advent

of TV rights that the owners could be talked into a deal where every team got an equal share of the TV revenue, which was a way harder sell in Major League Baseball. Okay, nobody watches it in person, but, and hear me out, gentlemen, what if they could not watch it at home. Yeah. Or at a bar. Yeah. So, but primarily because of the TV thing, pro football's popularity began to skyrocket

through the 50s, and that meant that suddenly everybody wanted in. A bunch of cities wanted NFL teams, because that used to come with a lot of prestige before they started to give them away to cities like Jacksonville, Florida. With the existing team owners were really standoffish about expansion, right? Especially now that they had this fucking communist revenue sharing model going on with television, right, the more teams, the more that that's going to be diluted. They were jealously protecting their brand. And no matter how many people came knocking, they kept saying no to adding more teams.

You hear that Puerto Rico and Samoa? You just got to get on TV. Yeah, they're a TV deal. But of all the people who had to be told. There's nothing that you can do. I'm going to bring you. I'm a straight, straight from my heart. Never going to happen.

Wait, let me check the audio boom map to see if we have a single Guamish listener. Whamish? Romomania? So of all the people that had to be told no on an expansion team, none had to be told no harder or more often than a persistent son of a Texas oil gazillionaire named Lamar Hunt. And when he couldn't get a new team, he tried to buy an existing team and move it to Dallas where he wanted the team. Right. So there was an obvious target at this point. The Chicago Cardinals were competing with the crosstown Chicago Bears, which were a way more popular. team. And this was hurting both teams' bottom lines, which hurt the entire fucking league's bottom line because of the revenue sharing. So everybody wanted the Cardinals the fuck out of Chicago

except the Cardinals owner. So the NFL commissioner tells Hunt, he's like, hey, if you want a team in Dallas, you got to talk the Cardinals owner into selling to you. And he cut the hat off a Cardinal, he put it in the guy's bed. And after that, they didn't hear a peep

out of him. I'll sell it to you, but it won't be cheap. It's cheap. All right. So Lamar Hunt flies out to Chicago. He puts the hard press

on this owner, this guy named Bidwell. And Bidwell isn't willing to budge, but during the negotiations, he says something along the lines of, I'll tell you the same thing I told those guys from Miami and New Orleans and Denver and Houston.

No. Okay. But then exactly one year later, the Cardinals moved to St. Louis. Yep. where they already had a baseball team called the St. Louis Cardinals. It was a pain in the ass for everybody. Yeah.

But okay, so Hunt leaves without what he wants. But on the way home, he gets to thinking, he's like, hey, if there are six different cities all trying to buy this one fucking team, there are enough desperate wannabe owners to start a whole different league. And among the copious notes, he jotted down during the remainder of his flight home, the American Football League was born. Right, because Dallas would never let an obnoxious oil tycoon from Arkansas be in charge of this. But AFL, it just might work. We'll see how it goes after the break. Oh, hey, Eli. Hey, Heath.

Did you, um... So you step out of the time machine just now? Yeah, we, uh... Yeah, sure did. Yeah, what were you doing? Um... Well, what do you think I was doing? I mean, I was, um, killing Hitler, of course.

Saying it weird. So, yeah, like, probably going to be a bunch more Jews around now. Okay, what were you really doing, Cecil? Okay, I was cooking dinner. Seriously? Sorry, I just really want to start eating better this year. And I, I mean, who has time to cook? Well, Cecil, if you want to start eating better without spending all your time in the kitchen,

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It's a long story. We made up Hitler so no one I wouldn't get mad at us one time. Yeah. You know what? Forget I asked. Yep. Smart.

Hey, Steve. Where you going? Oh, um, headed home. Home? Oh, man. We're just about to watch the dragon fight. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I saw. I'm just, I'm not really a dragon fight guy. What? What do you mean you're not a dragonfighter guy? Did you not grow up with it? No. No, I mean, I grew,

I grew up with it. We all grew up with it. I'm just not a fan. I don't understand. I mean, okay, I don't want to make this like a thing, but I don't like how many people get eaten by the dragon. Seriously? We have to admit, a lot of people get eaten by the dragon,

so it kind of feels weird watching fight the dragon, right? Steve, I know a lot of people got eaten by the dragon in the past, but they're much more up front about that in the dungeon now. Yeah, and they've got that fireproof helmet. Yeah, how many people wear that fireproof helmet? So out of the 1696 players, it's 20. Well, that number seems small, doesn't it? Look, Steve, Steve, people get hurt doing all kinds of stuff, man.

Yeah, it feels like you just don't like watching people fight dragons. I mean, I also don't like that. And hey, while we're putting it out there, I don't like that the only people who fight the dragon are black. Okay? I think it's weird that all the dragon fighters are black. But not all the dragon fighters are black. Really?

Which ones are white? The ones that we don't let get hurt. Okay. I'm headed out. 23 does seem like a low number, huh? It's because it looks like a diaper. Yeah, it does look like a diaper. It's like you put the big heads code into NBA jam.

Looks like a bobblehead. Hey, pie guest listener, I'm No Illusions. And I'm Cecil Something Italian. And we're cat guys, which means that we can tell you that the worst thing about having a cat... ...is when they speak with the voices of your dead loved ones. What? No, it's the litter box, man. Not with my cats, it's not.

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I sure have. Boxy Pro sent us some litter to try when they became a sponsor, and now they're the only brand of litter we use. That's why I, Noelusions, personally endorse Boxy Pro. All right, Noah, I'm sold. Where do I sign up? If you're trying to switch and litters looking for the one, get Foxy at B-O-X-I-E-C-A-T dot com.

It's the last letter you'll switch to. Enjoy 30% off with the code citation at boxy-cat.com slash citation. That's B-O-X-I-E-C-A-T-com forward-slash citation. All right, Noah, thanks. So I'm sorry, wait, the voices of your dead loved ones? I think it's more of like a channeling thing. Well, that's not better.

I didn't say it was better. I was just clarifying the process. Got it. And we're back. When we left off, Lamar Hunt was flying home from Chicago, and he wrote on a napkin American football league with hookers and blow. So, let's go. What's next?

Well, eventually hookers and blow, but we're not going to get that far into the story. So, okay, so to give you an idea how much more successful being a football team was by 1960, let me run down the names of the eight original teams in the American Football League, see if it didn't even ring a bell. The Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Dallas Texans, Denver, Brow. Roncos, Houston Oilers, Los Angeles Chargers, New York Titans, and Oakland Raiders, which were very narrowly avoided being called the Oakland Seniors. So, come on.

Yes, yeah, apparently the owner, the guy who owned him originally called everybody's Signor. Right, yeah, exactly. But it was so fucking good. So, but yeah, so a couple of those teams have changed their names, a couple of move cities, a couple have changed names and move cities. One of them moved cities and then moved back. All eight of them are still playing football at a professional level.

Okay, not the, at the original guys though, right? Because they'd be super old. No, they periodically change guys. I would 100% watch that. Oh my God, yes.

Fuck yeah. Yes. Hit breaker football. They was trying to get a team in Oakland and they were like, I don't know, the Oakland Mexican guys? So could we? The other guy who,

Seniors, we'll do Seniors. No, so the guy who owned the team, the guy who got the first, the team originally, he just called everybody's Signor, that was his nickname for everybody.

He wasn't Hispanic or anything. That's just what he called everybody. I don't think that makes it better. I guess that's slightly better than what I'm saying. I'm not a lot. We've said, Signior, so many times we're all going to be getting visited by ice now. Right.

Or perhaps me. But so the. Drew guys forgot about me as a bit for a second. No, we didn't. Tom made a reference. I'm always seen. Blam. Yeah, we're good.

You can go away. Your dad, it's canon. Now, I should say that the survival of these teams was by no means guaranteed when they launched this league in 1960. When the NFL commissioner at the time, Pete Roselle first heard about this new league, he was outwardly cool but inwardly furious. So immediately they start everything they can to undercut the new league every way they can think of. And one of the ways is by expanding the league right into several of the cities that the AFL just announced teams in. they also they moved up their draft and held it in secret

before the AFL draft but the AFL owners yeah the AFL owners so they had deep enough pockets that they could afford to shoulder some pretty heavy losses through the first few years so they persisted

hey we know you guys did a secret draft but like that's that's nothing the players can do whatever they want you know it's not like a military all the players that won in and on the other league show up with bone spurs the first day

sorry well it was so that they could start negotiating first, right? They didn't want the AFL to get to the players first, yeah. So now, and beyond that, the NFL had more prestige than the newer league. So most of the players wanted to play there, but there were way more aspiring players than there were spots

on NFL rosters. So the eight teams in the NFL didn't have much trouble filling out their spaces, right? And since they could be just as competitive when it came to salaries, a lot rookie prospects started eyeing the NFL. Now, this led to an insane program where the NFL

would actually like assign people to officially babysit college prospects for months leading up to the draft and try to box out any AFL scouts? Just a bunch of NFL guys seeing the AFL scouts getting close and like unfurling feathers doing a grist. Scouts of paradise. Just think about who's judge. the dances, right? Like, these are 22-year-old men with huge egos and a dozen concussions that they've, like, rubbed dirt in or whatever.

I'm surprised any of the recruiters lived for no one to tell this tale about. Oh, Tom, they would, like, occasionally, like, straight up kidnap these kids and just hold them in hotels and not let them leave. It was, it's fucking nuts. I'm surprised that kids didn't make them joust each other or something. Right, yes. Despite the. I'd make them joust each other so hard.

So, but despite the NFL's aggressive maneuvering, the new league managed to take root, and the main reason was, once again, television. So the NFL had just signed this new deal with CBS that gave the league $28 million, a lot of money back then, for two years of exclusive coverage. NBC wanted in, too, but they couldn't afford to spend $28 million on it. So instead, they offered about a little over half as much to the AFL. But here's the thing, though, the NFL was divving the NFL. air money up between 16 owners at that point.

The AFL was only dividing it among eight. Okay, this is exactly the kind of math that's going to get me kicked off this show one of these days. It's not crunch these numbers. Now, of course, pretty much the instant the second league started, there was talk among sports writers and sports fans about who would win between the NFL's champion and the AFL's champion. And the answer for those first several years was definitely the fucking NFL.

They had the better coaches and players. the more experienced ownership, the more sophisticated scouting departments. But that didn't actually mean they had the better product necessarily, right? Because two B-level football teams playing against each other can be every bit as thrilling as two A-level teams

playing against each other. Absolutely. Yeah. More so, if, as was the case here, the B-League has more innovative plays and is less inclined to just run the fucking ball 23 times in a row. Yeah, best game of football I ever saw, and I was part of it.

It was in 1991. Pearl River Middle School recess Fifth graders versus sixth graders is amazing except we lost 84 to 70 You were in there till the end though buddy You were in there until the end

They scored at the bell It was like they launched the play And if the bell happens after the snap It's that play counts And every play is a touchdown in middle school recessional You'll get it next time he's I might

I've been He's wandering around the middle school of Reese. It's like a fucking tiger in a cage just staring at these kids. Fifth grade against 47th grade. I was trying to get our fifth grade class together. I was trying to get the fifth grade class together to go to the reunion of the grade. Amazing.

Saddest Facebook message ever. If you went to fifth grade for Heath, I'm not a rich man, but I'll give you so much money for that like, hey, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, Facebook DM. So, okay, but here's the thing, though, as popular as the sport was getting, the two parallel league thing that wasn't sustainable. First of all, a couple of cities had competing franchises, which was bad for business, but more importantly, the two leagues had to outbid each other for potential star players.

And if there's one thing that can unite two warring capitalists, it's the looming threat labor rights. So less than a decade after the AFL played its first game, Roselle starts laying the groundwork for a merger. Now, the negotiations behind this merger are a thing of legend. They were advised early on that they shouldn't announce that they're doing this in advance, lest every owner drop 30 different demands into the mix and kill it before it starts. So at first, it's just Lamar Hunt, the AFL's founder, dealing with a GM of an expansion team called the Dallas Cowboys that would later go on to be known for their inability to make out of the first round of the playoffs.

And that's a Jaguars fan talking shit. Do you come out of you? Amazing. Damn boys. Amazing. More entomology. Yep. And by the way, the Cowboys GM, speaking of etymology, at least, the Cowboys GM at the time

shares a name with the fucking cartoon version of himself in a parallel universe. The dude was literally called Tex Schramm. Yeah. Fun fact, text Schram Also a great way to stop your dog from licking at the dead possum down by the crick. Tex? Frams.

Sorry, is this a legal contract between Tex Schramm and Pudge Huffle? Hample's like a tech to go badly somehow. Like a song of hobo sings while he's just dying of exposure. All right.

So as Hunt did Schrammer, carry on these top secret negotiations known only to Roselle and a couple other NFL owners, the AFL decides to bring on a new commissioner, the famously bellicose Al Davis, owner of the Oakland Seniors. Sorry, it's catcher that I thought. Anyway, so until this point, the leagues had a sort of gentleman's agreement that they would compete for rookies, but once one league signed a player, that player was off limits. And about this time, one of the NFL teams was like, fuck that, and they signed away an NFL kicker. Now, that was read by Davis as an act of and knowing nothing at all about these ongoing merger negotiations,

retaliated in kind. Okay, it's crazy. It took six years for somebody to be like, hey, we have money. You want to open up that Pandora's box, right? Because then everybody would be asking for more. Now, of course, the end result of this all-out effort to sign away other teams' players hastened the need for a merger,

though it did make everybody involved pissier, throughout the process. Ultimately, though, they were able to hammer out a deal that would bring all eight AFL franchises into the existing league. This was agreed to in 1966, but they wouldn't actually merge until 1970. That being said, the burning question on everybody's mind about who would win between the AFL and the NFL champions would be answered sooner because they agreed to start having those two teams face off immediately. Tomorrow we marry, but tonight we better Yes, exactly, actually. How very American of them, yeah.

So, okay, so it was that at the end of the 1966 season on January 15th of 1967, the first Super Bowl would be played, though it wouldn't be called that officially. Lamar Hunt came up with the name early on based on a toy called the Super Bowl that his kids liked, but it was only used informally for the first year, mostly because Pete Roselle fucking hated it. Hated it. And good on him. It's a stupid fucking name, and we only don't realize it now because we're used to it. But at the time, that would have been, like, calling it, like, the Nito Bowl or the Jesus Bowl.

Right. Or, like, like, a little bit more modern. It was like they decided to do it now and called it the awesome bowl. Right. So, but the first game was given the clunky moniker of the AFL NFL NFL World Championship game, which is admittedly even fucking worse than the Super Bowl. So the following year, they were calling it the Super Bowl and just, forcing future football fans to forever remember how Roman numerals work. Yeah, we're over 2,000 words in, and I'm no closer to understanding how or why it's

any adjective at all. Why is a ball? I don't. The stadium is bullshit. Stadium looks like a ball. And that's it. So that's a boring answer. Right.

Yes. It's a terrible. It's a serious discussion. Imbecile. It's stupid. You guys want me to stab him. admittedly, Tom is thinking about how to get how much cereal he could get in there, though, right now. That is what he's thinking.

Probably a lot. So much. So much, yeah. I feel like it's a lot. So, okay, so as expected, the first Super Bowl was a route by the NFL team. The Green Bay Packers devastated Lamar Hunt's Kansas City Chiefs, formerly the Dallas, Texas, 35 to 10. And they'd go on to win the second Super Bowl by an only slightly less embarrassing ass kicking of 33 to 14 against the seniors. It was so bad, in fact, that they'd be.

there was talk that in the next season of maybe revamping the playoff format so that two NFL teams could play each other. But then, in-stepped Broadway, Joe. Biden? Okay. All right. I double-checked this. Biden's actually one year old. He's older than the name of the other. That's amazing. So, okay. Fine is actually a pretty good football player. Yeah. No, that's why it was. I was. I don't think, I think I think I could take him now. But so. I bet he's scrapping. He'd have that old man strength. And the teetering probably makes him hard to tackle.

No, you're right. It should be nervous. Yeah. So, okay. Now, there have been, as of the time of this recording, 59 Super Bowls played, and there are differing opinions on which one was the best. Some would say it was the Giants upset win over the up till then undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl 42. Others are fucking wrong, and they can go fuck themselves.

But in many ways, the most important Super Bowl remains Super Bowl three. were in Broadway, Joe Namath, guaranteed victory against the Baltimore Colts and then pulled it off in an admittedly not very interesting game. But it did establish that the two leagues at least were close enough to parody to field a competitive championship. And it established the Super Bowl as the most dominant sporting event in the country, a title it would retain at least through this recording. All right. If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? There's always next year. I get it.

And are you ready for the quiz? On three, hut, hunt, hunt. So that's go, that's go. That's go. Time to go. All right. For the cereal.

For the cereal. Switch to you. I need a lot of minutes. No, please. Don't God. All right. Noah, professional football's path to glory is paved with the blood,

sweat, and tears of high school kids across this great nation. Which two facts are true about high school football? A, The odds of getting a concussion playing high school football are around 20%. Oh, my God. B, the odds of a high school.

No, just playing over the career, yeah. Yeah, over your career. Over the career. Still feels high. The odds of a high school player making it all the way to the NFL is around 0.02%. Oh, wow. C. May the odds be ever in your favor.

I'm going to go to secret answer D. It all pales in comparison to the rate of catastrophic injuries among high school cheerleaders. for which there isn't even the powerball odds of a pro career. It's a lot harder to moor suicide your family with the pom-poms, though. So we don't, the press doesn't like to talk about it. All right, Noah, like the red-cheeked rub that you are, you neglected to mention the most important part of the Super Bowl,

the commercials. All right, so Eli, originally there was like nine goddamn paragraphs on the commercial. I had to cut it because there was just no way to talk about with this time. I was getting so bloated. These stars studded million-dollar affairs have grown weirder and weirder, just like our fucking country. So which of the following is not a real Super Bowl commercial?

A, a planter's peanut commercial wherein Mr. Peanut, their mascot dies in a car accident and is reborn as a child out of a flower like the predicted antichrist. B, a turbotax ad called Robo Child where an android toddler expressed his desire to work for turbotax only to learn that he lacked the emotional complexity which caused him to laugh in despair or see a 2019 Burger King ad

that was just a video of Andy Warhol eating a whopper or D the 2012 Honda CRV commercial starring vehicular manslaughter enthusiast

Matthew Broderet Matthew's Day Off Oh my God All right So secret answer E Anything that gave us The original space jam commercial Was worth whatever price we paid for it

Oh yeah With Jordan and Bird Yeah All right No which of the following is a real thing about Lamar Hunt. A, in addition to the AFL, he also founded Major League Soccer. B, Lamar and his two idiot brothers tried to corner the market on silver in the entire world in the late 1970s.

C, by 1979, they owned about two-thirds of all the silver in the world. And their scheme spiked the price from about $10 an ounce to about $50 an ounce. by early 1980. D, that was obviously fucking bad, so regulators just changed the rules. The prices went way down, and the hunts had to pay margin calls, and they lost a huge amount

of money. Oh, my God. Or E, Lamar's second wife, Norma, was the only woman to attend every single Super Bowl from 1967 until her death in 2023. All right, well, with the proviso that it would be weird if some other lady

went to all of them, but stopped in 2020 three when Norma died. I'm going to say a secret answer F all of the above. That is correct. I'm just here for Norma. Okay. Noah, when they combine

the team names again for another World War, what's the best combined team name? A, the giant Jags, B, the Ram Boys, C, the Brown Packers, or D, the washing balls. Oh, the washing balls. It's

D. Sorry, it's the Brown Packers. Oh, all right. All right, well, then, like, I guess booty could throw for him. That'd be nice. All right. Cecil, you stumped him, but you also said washing balls.

I said washing balls. Me and Tom both said washing balls, though. So we also... It's going to be Eli, because he didn't say washing balls. Oh, that's my secret. All right. Well, for Tom, Noah Cecil and Eli, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us.

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