Some Super Bowl Facts

Super-Sized Super Bowl

It commands the biggest audience, the highest price for television ads, and the seven hours prior to it just for game analysis. Super Bowl time is almost upon us. And when you hear that it's the biggest TV event of the year, that's not a lie. To give you an idea of how huge it has become, here are some fun facts from last year's big game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. A Worldwide Audience The total audience for the game was 106 million people, making it the most watched television event ever. It was broadcast in 232 countries and territories and translated into 34 languages. Got The Munchies? The food numbers for the game were absurd. It would take 222,792 football fields worth of farmland to grow all the corn (eight million pounds of popcorn), potatoes (28 million pounds of potato chips) and avocados (53.5 million pounds) that were eaten during the game. There were also a billion chicken wings eaten and more than 325 million gallons of beer consumed. Also, if you laid all the potato chips eaten during the game end to end, they would circle the earth 11.72 times. Feel The Power About 187,800 Kilowatt/hours of energy were spent at the Super Bowl stadium. Televisions tuned into the game consumed about 10,004,600 Kilowatt/hours of power. For some perspective, that's more than the amount of solar power Kilowatt/hours generated by the United States. Show Me The Money Did you think we wouldn't talk about this? The city hosting the big game typically has about $400 million added to its local economy. But that is dwarfed by the $5.6 billion that consumers spend for Super-Bowl-related items. The cost of a 30-second commercial is well-documented ($2.8 million last year), and there are plenty of new HDTVs on which to watch said commercials (2.9 million units were sold in 2009). Oh, by the way ... it costs $12,500 for Tiffany & Co. to produce the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Hope the winners don't drop it when they hoist it. Source: Tree Hugger