Forty five years ago, the Super Bowl wasn’t even the Super Bowl.
They called it the NFL-AFL Championship game, until one of the founders renamed it after watching his grandson play with a “High Bouncing Ball” – a super ball.
Tickets were only fifteen bucks for that first game, and they barely sold half of those, leaving some 40,000 empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.
A 30-second ad cost only $42,000, and they weren’t any different than the ads they showed the previous weekend.
The half-time show featured three college marching bands, including one you might have seen from the University of Michigan.
Over the next couple decades, of course, the event became a veritable national holiday. Tickets now sell for thousands of dollars, and ads for millions. The game attracts more than 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone.