Did you know? Football Facts

• Football has one of the shortest seasons of any professional sport — 17 weeks — but the popularity of football surpasses every other sport with tailgating, cheering teams with stickers and flags on cars and watching the annual Superbowl, the most watched television program of the year.

• The Pittsburgh Steelers claim the top spot for most Superbowl wins — six wins out of eight Super Bowl appearances. The New England Patriots and Dallas Cowboys have also played in eight Super Bowl games, but the Cowboys have won five, and the Patriots have won four of the championships.

• Football revenue escalates dramatically: CBS only paid $4.65 million for broadcast rights in 1962, but Fox now pays $1.15 billion per year for only NFC broadcast rights, which doesn’t even include broadcast of the NFL Championship.[4]

• Pro football games have been played on every day of the week. The only Tuesday game was played because of a blizzard in Pennsylvania. The only Wednesday game was played when a Washington-New York game was rescheduled to prevent it from running into John McCain’s acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.

• The spread is generally narrow between professional teams, and only 11 games since 1987 had a spread of 20 or more points. None of these underdogs have ever won, but the Philly Eagles, who were a 24.5 underdog to the New England patriots, led 28-24 in the fourth quarter before losing 31-28.

• The first televised pro game occurred in 1939. The spectacle was less compelling than a modern Super Bowl game. The first televised game only reached about 500 television sets, and the commercials were nothing to generate buzz at the water cooler. The game was between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles. The 500 broadcast sets were located in New York.