Lots of ink has been devoted to discussing changing the World Series to something more like the Super Bowl. But why hasn’t the reverse been attempted? Hear me out!
What if the Super Bowl was a series played on three consecutive Sundays. Even if one team won the first two, the ratings and advertising dollars would be duplicated or nearly so. That brass ring alone is enough to surprise me that this hasn’t really been discussed. There’s money being left on the table by ignoring the opportunity for a double (or triple) dip.
Yes, there’s a long bowl tradition in football, and there is an undoubted appeal with the one-game-winner-take-all approach, but I picture a game three that has the public whipped up into a frenzy that would dwarf the average Super Bowl Sunday.
I think the main problem is the fact that there is SO much riding on the host city’s ability to keep hotel rooms, offer up entertainment all week long leading up to the Super Bowl, and provide security/public resources/etc., that it would be a nightmare to extend that to 3 weeks. And if you swap out locations for each of the three weeks, how screwed does the city that hosts Game 3 get if the winner goes 2-0? The owners would never allow it on those grounds.
Ratings for a three-game series wouldn’t be the current ratings duplicated across three weeks. Today it’s an event. There are Super Bowl parties - which I don’t envision happening over three weeks - and commercial debuts - same thing - and would be a logistical nightmare for the host city.
The Super Bowl is a one day event. It’s the first chance for a party after Christmas/New Years. People that have been dieting since the New Year get to gorge on forbidden food. It also attracts very casual fans, many of whom have no interest in either team. Put two small market teams in a best out of 3 Super Bowls and the ratings would plummet, especially if you get a blowout in the first game. Let’s say this year the Carolina Panthers and the Cincinnati Bengals make the Super Bowl. You’ll get top ratings for one big game even when neither of these teams have a large national following. But, three weekends in a row, only the die hard NFL fans would tune in.
The main problem with making the Super Bowl a best-of-3 series is, you have to plan for Game 3 and then have a contingency plan in case the same team wins the first two. There would be a considerable number of hotel and airline cancellations, and whatever TV network was planning on airing the game now doesn’t get the advertising revenue for that game. Okay, the World Series (and the NBA and Stanley Cup Finals, while you’re at it) have a similar problem, but considering the popularity of the Super Bowl, I don’t think it would work as well.
There’s a reason the World Cup Soccer Final isn’t 2-out-of-3. In fact, there was a time when, if the final ended in a draw even after extra time, the match would be replayed two days later. Its international popularity got to the point where this was now out of the question; now, it has to be “decided on the day”, unless it is rained out.
Here’s an example of some serious miscalculations: in Australia’s main Australian Rules Football league, the playoffs last four weeks - but if any match ends in a tie, instead of any sort of overtime, the match would be replayed the following week, and all other matches scheduled for that week and later (including the championship game) were pushed back a week. About 20 years ago, there was a tie in the second week, and it became such a mess that they added an overtime for postseason matches (as many 10-minute overtime periods as it takes until it’s not tied at the end of a period, I think)…except for the championship, which still had a “play it again the next week” rule, although they may have changed that as well after the 2010 tie.
One big difference between the Super Bowl and those championship series is the location. The Super Bowl host city is selected years in advance, and a tremendous amount of preparation is done for it (at least in part because they have that much time). That’s preparation which would potentially be wasted for a “Super Bowl Game 3”.
On the other hand, in the other major sports, the championship series games are split between the home cities of the two participating teams, and those locations aren’t known until just days before the games are played.
Also, many (if not most) of the attendees at World Series, Stanley Cup, and NBA Championship games are fans of the home team, while only a minority of the tickets for the Super Bowl are allotted to the two participating teams (other tickets go to the host city / team, the other NFL teams, and the league itself). Thus, the way things are structured today, the vast majority of attendees at at Super Bowl are from “out of town”, and that proportion is likely far higher than for the other championships.
For these reasons, the Super Bowl is a lot more like a college bowl game, or the Final Four, than it is like the championships of the other major American pro sports.
Well, there’s also the fact that it’s football. It’s difficult enough as it is for NFL players to make it that far; the quality of football being played by the time Game 3 rolls around could be pretty lousy.
That said, I agree the main objection is that a best-of-3 is no longer the Super Bowl. A Super Bowl is by definition one game, and that’s a large part of its appeal. **The NFL is primarily a TV show, not a live event - **like a TV series, it’s basically a TV show taped before a live studio audience. The entire packaging and presentation of the NFL is centred around its presentation as a television program, and the Super Bowl and all the hoopla and parties that surround it are part of the branding of that show (as is the fact that the NFL is a very short season; one thing they do right is they leave the audience wanting more, whereas the other sports take up more than half a year, with the NHL taking up an exhausting 8-9 months.) It just doesn’t translate to a three-weeks-in-a-row thing.
The last Super Bowl party I went to (the last Super Bowl) we had 40 people out and I bet 30 of them knew nothing, or next to nothing, about football. It’s an event. a party excuse.
Baseball needs a best-of series for its championship, since the game has such a large variance. Even the worst team in the league playing against the best team has something like one chance in three of winning. Play a bunch of games, though, and it’s much less likely that the worse team will win the majority of them. Football, though, has a lower variance, and so there’s less need for a series.