Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

So, uh, any big games this weekend?

Probably there’s a recent transplant to the U.S. from Japan or Hungary for whom that’s a real question. For the rest of the country, sports fans or not, the answer is becoming increasingly obvious as Super Bowl hype builds to a fever pitch.

The Super Bowl commands so much attention for many reasons, and several of the most imporant ones have little to do with football per se. This is so because the culmination of the NFL championship hunt has become a cultural event and a business event as much as it is a sporting event.

As a cultural event, Super Bowl Sunday has become an informal national holiday, on par with Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. It’s a holiday when people get their friends together, fire up the grill, and drink too much beer as they celebrate . . . well, what exactly? I think most of us are celebrating friendship and a sort of imprecise Americanness — but one that’s open to anyone, male or female, American or otherwise, who’s willing to put up with a four-and-a-half-hour football game.

Meanwhile, canny marketers have turned the event into a major selling opportunity. Old-school advertising has had more and more trouble in recent years cutting through the clutter of marketing messages that bombards consumers daily; the Super Bowl provides one of the very few opportunities to reach hundreds of millions of consumers across all demographics. And since Super Bowl commercials have become a competitive genre in their own right, many of those consumers will purposefully pay special attention to the advertisements — something that they never do otherwise.

The Super Bowl’s success as a marketing venue is the apotheosis of the NFL’s triumphant quest to become the dominant league in an American sports landscape populated by giants. Baseball is still called the “national pastime,” but the gridiron long ago displaced the diamond in the hierarchy of American sport. And while the NBA has risen (in the 1980s and 1990s) and declined (in this decade), the NFL has sailed serenely on, gaining popularity by the year. So it’s no wonder that the grand finale of the pro football season attracts so much attention.

It helps when there’s a good game scheduled on the field, too — and Super Bowl XLII could be a doozy. League officials must have been salivating for many weeks now, since playoff matchups made it likely that either an undefeated New England Patriots team or their archnemesis, the defending-champion Indianapolis Colts, would face either the Dallas Cowboys or the Green Bay Packers — two of the most popular and storied franchises in American sports.

Given the likelihood of these matchups, the New York Giants could be viewed as an upstart team, except that they represent the largest city in the country and have their own long and proud history of championship football. They got to the Super Bowl by beating the Cowboys in Dallas, and then topping the Packers in a bitterly cold game in Lambeau Stadium. The Giants have also peaked at the right time: since the beginning of December, they’ve won six out of eight games.

One of those two losses came in the last week of the regular season, when the Giants lost at home to the Patriots in a 38-35 nail-biter. In facing the Giants again, the Patriots will be attempting to do the unthinkable by putting up a combined 19-0 record, a mark that no team has ever accomplished. Besides establishing a record that might stand for decades — as the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ perfect 17-0 season has until now — a Patriots win on Sunday would crown a great football dynasty, since New England also won championships in 2002, 2004, and 2005. (In their “off” years, the Pats went 9-7, 11-6, and 14-4.) It would also, after the champagne stopped flowing, raise the question of what the most successful NFL team of this decade could do to top itself.

The same spoiled-for-choice question already faces the NFL: how do you improve on the most successful annual sporting event in the world?

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Stay tuned to this blog and to Bizmology this week and next as we bring you more coverage of the Super Bowl and its business ramifications.