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Quick quiz: Can you name an American you know who has never watched a Super Bowl? That’s a trick question, because, according to Nielsen, few such people exist. Of the 32 most-watched TV programs in U.S. history, 30 of them are Super Bowls. This year’s National Football League championship takes place Sunday, Feb. 12, in Glendale, Arizona, between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs. It will be the 57th Super Bowl, and it’s an event we love in so many ways.
The pregame
![Pink sings the Superbowl pre-game national anthem in 2018 Pink sings the Superbowl pre-game national anthem in 2018](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarpe/en/home/home-family/friends-family/info-2023/super-bowl-moments-and-facts/_jcr_content/root/container_main/container_body_main/list_container_body1/container_body_cf/body_one_cf_listicle_one/cfimage.coreimg.50.932.jpeg/content/dam/aarp/entertainment/television/2023/01/1140-pink-sings-national-anthem-2018.jpg)
Thirty minutes. That’s how much time TV networks spent setting up the game in most of the early years of Super Bowl coverage. In 1978, before the Dallas Cowboys played the Denver Broncos, CBS needed to fill time because a golf tournament earlier in the day had been postponed. The marathon pregame show was born. NBC’s 2022 pregame stretched for five hours.
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The food
![A Superbowl party table with chicken wings, celery, and dip, party pretzel snack mix, banners, beer, and a football. A Superbowl party table with chicken wings, celery, and dip, party pretzel snack mix, banners, beer, and a football.](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarpe/en/home/home-family/friends-family/info-2023/super-bowl-moments-and-facts/_jcr_content/root/container_main/container_body_main/list_container_body1/container_body_cf/body_one_cf_listicle_two/cfimage.coreimg.50.932.jpeg/content/dam/aarp/entertainment/television/2023/01/1140-superbowl-snacks.jpg)
Americans ate a whole lot of a very American cuisine — about 1.42 billion chicken wings — while watching the Los Angeles Rams play the Cincinnati Bengals last season, according to a real authority on the matter: the National Chicken Council.
Italy might be where the pizza was born, but Super Bowls are where they give us the most heartburn. We eat more than 12.5 million pizzas on the day of the big game. The most popular topping? It’s easy to pick that winner: pepperoni, says the American Pizza Community.