NFL Sponsors Sidelined By Super Bowl Competitors

Tickets for the game between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers are selling for an average price of $4,957, according to ticket tracking site SeatGeek.

What has Super Bowl to do with flu spread?

The researchers analyzed county-level data from 1974 to 2009, comparing the rates of influenza-related death in areas that had an NFL team in the Super Bowl to the rates in places that also had football teams but did not reach the the big game that year. Even those who don’t know a touchdown from a tackle often tune in for the commercials, and with good reason: companies spend millions just staking out ad space during the game, and millions more to produce some of the slickest, funniest, weirdest, and generally most attention-grabby spots you’ll see all year.

The over/under for Super Bowl Sunday opened at 45 points at the majority of online and Vegas sports books.

CBS seized the Tuesday ratings crown, a two-hour Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials special rating a 2.1 in adults 18-49, per the Nielsen overnights.

According to researchers from Los Angeles-based Tulane University, cities with teams in the Super Bowl saw a rise in flu deaths. People over this age are more vulnerable to serious complications from the flu.

The Super Bowl has to be the only television broadcast of the year where the ads are nearly as eagerly hyped as the event itself.

“The mechanism that’s driving this is the increased socialization that happens as a result of the team being successful”, study author Nicholas Sanders, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University’s Department of Policy Analysis and Management, in Ithaca, N.Y., said in a university news release.

But back to the Super Bowl. The study found no impact on influenza mortality in hosting cities. The studio could go all-in on its Marvel superhero universe by promoting both Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse (out May 27).