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Why the Super Bowl is on Sunday

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February 05, 2012|By Craig Harline

(istockphoto/Globe Staff…)

Super Bowl Sunday is such a familiar part of the American cultural landscape that it might seem silly to ask how the Super Bowl — and professional football in general — ever came to be played on Sunday in the first place.

But rewind the clock far enough, and the juxtaposition would be shocking. To the Puritans who helped found the nation, Sunday was the Sabbath (divinely transferred from Saturday). In their minds, the Sabbath’s prohibition on work extended to play as well.

How did that change? Super Bowl Sunday — and the consecration of fall Sundays to the NFL more generally — was in a sense the result of a long argument over Sunday play in America that extended from Colonial times all the way to the 1920s. By then, America had become home to many generations of immigrants who belonged to Christian denominations that were far more open to the idea of Sunday recreation. Their influence, plus the emergence of newly positive attitudes toward sport in general, helped to end national debate over Sunday sport — paving the way for pro football on Sunday, and eventually leading to the Super Bowl becoming the nation’s biggest shared spectacle.

These days it has become commonplace to joke about Super Bowl Sunday being an American holy day, but the story of Sunday football suggests that there’s more than a little truth to that notion. The Super Bowl does not occur on Sunday coincidentally, or in spite of it being Sunday, but precisely because Sundays in general were holy to so many Americans — and because sports, in a peculiarly American fashion, worked their way into religion itself.

Early pro football leagues, made up mostly of factory workers, played not on Sundays but on Saturdays, like college teams. But they couldn’t compete with college football — a sport that was then more popular than the professional game — and the early leagues folded fast.

Right around the end of World War I, however, a new league in the Midwest, which would become the NFL, had the novel idea to try Sunday instead. Some professional baseball teams had played on Sunday for decades, from the time they realized that they drew their biggest crowds that day. The new NFL decided to imitate them, and the crowds began to grow, even though they remained smaller than college crowds until the 1950s.

Still, even those fans who liked Sunday play weren’t so sure about professional sports moving into their sacred day. Not all fans and players belonged to churches, of course, but many did. Without their approval, there would have been no pro sports on Sunday.