The Super Bowl is this weekend. You may have heard of it.
What you may not know, however, is the way the game has grown.
The National Football League is the most popular avenue in all of pop culture - it's the most-watched TV program on five different networks - and soon will be a $10-billion-a-year enterprise.
The Super Bowl is the NFL's crown jewel.
For example, the U.S. population was 198 million when the Super Bowl started in 1967. Last year, more than 114 million Americans watched the Super Bowl.
According to Money magazine, during last year's Super Bowl, Americans consumed more than 1 billion chicken wings, 11 million pounds of potato chips, 4 million pounds of popcorn and almost 80 million pounds of avocados.
Domino's Pizza reported it sold 12 million slices of pizza during Super Bowl Sunday last year. That's enough pizza slices to cover the 100 yards of a football field 20,000 times.
The average ticket price for Super Bowl I - which did not sell out all its seats - was about $15. Average ticket prices for lower-level seats Sunday are around $3,000.
As for the commercials, well, a 30-second TV ad in the first Super Bowl, which was broadcast simultaneously on NBC and CBS, cost $42,000, or $1,400 a second. Sunday, advertisers are lining up to pay $5 million for 30 seconds of time, which averages out to about $166,666 per second. (The average American would need five years to earn $166,666 in salary.)
Super indeed.
Sodom and Cleveland
Last year, it was the Cleveland Police Department that had a hard time remembering their handcuffs were for official business.
Now, the Cleveland school system is cringing over similar issues.
Cleveland City Schools Director Martin Ringstaff was fired Friday after school board members learned he had sent sexually explicit messages and photos to a woman who is not his wife.
And can someone explain how one guy who runs a school system can get fired in less than 48 hours because he was running around on his wife, yet another guy running a school system that is embroiled in a national controversy - and has plummeting test scores to boot - is allowed to walk away with a mid-six-figure buyout?
Somehow, that seems backward, right?
Next on the Metamucil Stage
OK, REO Speedwagon has been added to the Riverbend roster.
We're in. (Of course we're in. It's Riverbend.)
When news broke that the 'Wagon was rolling into town, TFP Life Editor Shawn Ryan shared a story that the rock group had back in the day been banned by Hyatt Hotels across the country for conduct unbecoming an adult but expected by rock-n-rollers.
No worries about their time here next summer, though. They could rent out a wing at Alexian Village and feel right at home.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com. His "Right to the Point" column runs on A2 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.