WASHINGTON — The Super Bowl isn’t just a football game – it’s America’s biggest party.
The broadcast draws massive audiences globally, attracting even casual viewers with its electrifying halftime show performances and marquee commercial spots.
Not only is it a big day for television and sports, it’s also reportedly the second-largest day for food consumption in the U.S., behind Thanksgiving Day.
Why is the Super Bowl always on a Sunday?
Ever since the championship game’s inception on Jan. 15, 1967, the Super Bowl has always been played on Sundays. And for years, fans of the sporting event have signed online petitions to move the Super Bowl to Saturday.
That’s partly because Mondays after the Super Bowl are notorious for the number of employees calling out of work. Millions of Americans call out of work or fake illnesses each year on either the day of the game or the day after.
In 2024, more than 16.1 million U.S. employees said they planned to miss work on Monday after the Super Bowl. This included over 6 million workers who will risk a penalty for faking their sickness or “ghost” work all together and not show up, according to a survey by the Workforce Institute.
The “Super Bowl Flu” as it’s referred to in the survey, emerges each year after the big game.
One of the more recent attempts to try and convince the league to change the big game was a Florida high school senior’s petition, which received over 144,000 signatures on Change.org.
Despite fan pleas, the NFL has held to the Sunday schedule for nearly 60 years. Part of it is tradition, but there are serious monetary concerns associated with the biggest game of the year as well.
One reason the NFL is adamant about keeping the Super Bowl on Sundays is due to TV ratings, according to past comments from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
“The reason we haven’t done it in the past is simply just from an audience standpoint. The audiences on Sunday night are so much larger,” Goodell said in 2018. “Fans want to have the best opportunity to be able to see the game and we want to give that to them, so Sunday night is a better night.”
What about moving the Super Bowl to a holiday weekend?
Roughly one third of U.S. employees say they believe the day after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday.
The push has even got NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s attention.
In April 2024, Goodells said that while he thinks the current 17-game format is good, he’d like to see a schedule with just two preseason games and 18 regular season games.
“I think we’re good at seventeen [games] now, but listen, we’re always looking at how we continue. I’m not a fan of the preseason, I don’t think we need preseason,” Goodell said during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” in Detroit for the NFL draft.
The commissioner pointed out that moving to a two and 18 schedule would put Super Bowl Sunday on Presidents Day weekend.
“That ends up on Presidents Day weekend, which is a three-day weekend, which makes the Sunday night and then you have Monday off,” Goodell described.
When is the Super Bowl? What time does the Super Bowl kick off?
The game will kick off on Sunday Feb. 9, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time. Super Bowl 59 will be played at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, marking the 11th time the big game is hosted by the city.
It is also the eighth time that the Superdome has hosted the Super Bowl, the most of any NFL stadium.