Super Bowl Facts: Cash Rules Everything Around Giants vs. Patriots

Money talks, which makes perfect sense considering the Super Bowl is far and away the loudest and most expensive sporting event in America, with an increasingly obnoxious footprint abroad.

The final game of the NFL season is always the cause for the changing hands of insane sums of cash, from the two cents that every Joe Schmo is annually compelled to contribute to predictions, to the thousands bettors have already laid down on the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, to the millions more than advertisers have already plunked down for air time.

So while Darren Rovell is busy dissing Playboy Playmates in Indianapolis, let's have a look at some of the numbers swirling around Sunday's big game.

First off, the advertising, of which we'll be hearing and seeing plenty for the next day or so. The average 30-second Super Bowl ad will run somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.5 million, easily outpacing last year's all-time record of $3.1 million.

And remember, most of those fancy ads you'll see crawling across your screen, begging for your attention, run much longer than just 30 seconds. The ones involving drawn-out plot lines, celebrity cameos and movie and TV homages tend to run anywhere between a minute-and-a-half and two minutes, if not longer

That adds up to as much as $14 million for a single ad and approximately $250 million in advertising revenue raked in by NBC over the course of the entire game.

Why the exorbitant expense for the spots? Consider the size of the audience. Super Bowl XLVI is expected to draw the largest viewership for any single event in the history of television, well outpacing the previous record of 111 million set by last year during Super Bowl XLV between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

And that was with two teams from relatively small markets, albeit with national and historical appeal. The Giants and the Pats, on the other hand, hail from two of the biggest media markets in the country (New York and Boston, respectively) and, in case you haven't heard already, played for the Vince Lombardi Trophy four years ago.

Not to mention the new revenue streams that will come from broadcasting the Super Bowl online for the very first time.

Hosting the game has meant hundreds of millions generated for the city of Indianapolis, as well. According to Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard, the economic impact of the Super Bowl is predicted to fall somewhere between $200 and $250 million, with most seats running at several thousand dollars a pop on the secondary market.

As for the players, they'll make a few extra bucks for showing up, too. Players on the winning team will earn $88,000 while those on the losing side will garner $44,000 for their efforts.

That may sound all well and good until you consider that the money earned represents a significant pay cut for the game's better-paid players, including Tom Brady and Eli Manning, who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per week during the regular season.

Though I can't imagine any player, especially a high-profile one on a big contract, ever turning down the opportunity to participate in the biggest game on the biggest stage on account of money.

Neither are the ridiculous gobs of capital likely to prevent any potential viewer from turning a blind eye to a game that's become nothing short of a national spectacle over the years.

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