Super Bowl 2011: The World's Biggest Sporting Event for the Football Noob

So, the Super Bowl. What does this actually pertain to? If you are a complete newbie in the world of the National Football League—such as a little bit of googling will get you to know as the hosting sporting corporation of what is dubbed by most fanatics in America as the greatest sporting event int he world—this article serves to be something of an idiot's guide to the Super Bowl 2011.

If you know nothing at all about football, to say nothing about the Super Bowl, then this is the right read for you. If nothing else, only because the present writer is just a newbie as the reader.

What actually is the Super Bowl? Well, as a short bit of research around the Internet would reveal, the Super Bowl first began in 1967, as the peaceful culmination in a rivalry between the two major leagues in football, the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL).

A rivalry, of course, not within the sport, but over the management of football in America—two leagues seemed one too many. The Super Bowl was formed—named after a child's toy, it is apocryphally told—as a merger between the two leagues, in providing an avenue for real rivalry between them.

Basically, the Super Bowl has been held since 1967 every year, to determine the football champion for the year before. The NFL and AFL hold semifinal playoffs for berths in the final, the Super Bowl.

But the final, ironically, in determining the champion for the season, is played early in the year after—something probably logical in that football sense, I suppose. So we don't actually know the champion for a certain year, in that certain year. Thus, this year's 2011 game will determine the football champion for 2010.

Of course, it is Super for that very reason enumerated, that the AFC champion and NFC champion clash for the match of America's top two teams. So who are the top two teams of 2011?

On the AFC side we have the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the NFC the Green Bay Packers. Two teams, no doubt, as resonant as perhaps Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal to the tennis fan, and probably as big.

This year marks not the first time either team has played, of course, with the Steelers having won the most number of Super Bowls ever, at a 6-1 record, while the Green Bay Packers had won the first two Super Bowls ever played. So, as far as some cursory reading goes, it seems that we have this year the clash of two of the greatest teams ever to have played in the NFL.

What else would the football idiot need to know before the Super Bowl begins? Well, the venue. This year we find it in Texas, at Cowboys Stadium, an aptly named stadium for the sort of wild football we are likely to witness.

Just going from the team names, of course—because the present writer would not even pretend to be able to expertly analyse the team players Super Bowl—the Steelers and the Packers just sounds something out of a family feud out west.

For some statistical perspective, however, it may be interesting to note that the Packers have lost their last encounter against the Steelers, by the tight sounding score of 37-36. Which makes, them, apparently the favourites according to the bookmakers.

So the football idiot should know something about the history of the Super Bowl and the two contesting teams just for any random, remotely pretentious conversation one might find oneself in at the stadium itself, or among some football-crazy friends.

But when will it be on, precisely, just so such a conversation might happen at the right time? February 6, just over a week, in fact, and a de facto national holiday, for those who have always wondered why the streets were always so quiet on the first February Sundays.

There seems something intrinsically American about "Super;" so would the tennis fan, of course, know about the US Open's "Super Saturday," when the men's semifinals and women's final are played on the same day.

But of course, we deal in the Super Bowl not with super matches, but with the one, seemingly supra-super Bowl. Whatever one should think about the name, it strikes the present writer, a total football noob, as something akin to a comic of Asterix, who goes on his grand, transcendental quest for the...Bowl.

Perhaps this is what people mean when they say the Super Bowl is the world's greatest sporting event—its' intrinsically fun and games, and while most likely anything but, still at heart simply an expression of that human search for frivolity and distraction.

Of course, the only people not distracted next Sunday will likely be the teams themselves. For the football idiot who cannot appreciate the sport like the fanatics, this may be hardly perceptible, but at the end it will probably be something trans-football, and universally human, which all spectators will appreciate: the contest.