If the full Tennessee state Senate and state House could vote this Friday, they might be willing to pass a bill filed in the legislature that would make Super Bowl Monday a holiday instead of Columbus Day in October.
After all, many legislators, like their fellow Tennesseans, will wake up this coming Monday morning bleary-eyed from watching the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII, aching from too many Buffalo chicken wings and bloated from too much beer.
Doing the people's business won't look any more desirable that day than it will be for a line worker at Volkswagen, an executive at Unum or a teacher at Howard Connect School.
When the actual bill -- sponsored by state Sen. London Lamar, D-Memphis, and state Rep. Joe Towns, D-Memphis -- comes up for consideration, though, the Super Bowl will be in the history books and the subsequent food comas and beer hangovers long forgotten.
Were the state to adopt such a bill, it would make Tennessee the first state in the nation to have such a holiday.
Research in 2021 by The Workforce Institute at Kronos estimated the day after the Super Bowl is one of the most unproductive days for American workers because of the number of people who take the day off, either planned in advance or by calling in sick.
"My bill simply wants to examine giving the rest of us the day off," Towns told Yahoo Sports. "Let's face it, it doesn't get much more American than the Super Bowl and it's becoming more and more the norm to miss work the next day. So maybe we should just codify it ... or at least just talk about it."
The legislator also said the final version of his bill would not swap Super Bowl Monday for Columbus Day but would add it as a new state holiday.
Lamar and Towns aren't the first to have the idea. Petitions to make the Monday following the big game a national holiday were mounted in 2013 and 2019, but they went nowhere.
However, the idea in Tennessee is unlikely to gain ground, either. Adding the holiday to the first two months of the year, which already have New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Presidents Day as federal days off, seems excessive.
Another day off would be popular with the Tennesseans who are among the 100 million or so Americans who watch the game, but we think it makes about as much sense as the effort -- tried three times in the last decade -- to make the state the first in the country to adopt the Bible as its state book.
Now if the Titans were to play in and win a Super Bowl, and the governor decided to give everybody the next day off, that might be another thing.