Super Bowl 2016: Carolina Panthers vs. Denver Broncos

The Super Bowl dominates the list of the most-watched programs in American television history, routinely drawing more than 100 million total viewers — even in the current era, where shows that attract more than 10 million are considered smash hits.

The mania for all things related to the NFL’s annual championship game spreads beyond game day. Sports news channels offer round-the-clock coverage of every pregame interview and workout. The NFL’s own cable network runs marathons of past Super Bowl highlights. Entertainment media speculates about what the halftime show will entail. And seemingly everyone — from casual fans to the New York Times — talks about the commercials.

Being a sports camera operator has a lot in common with being an athlete: It takes endurance, athletic knowledge, and teamwork. And while you’re at work, millions of people are sitting on their couches, crumbs on their shirts, judging your every move.

Joe Sonnenburg has shot a wide variety of sports events for TV for almost a decade, and he posts highlights of his exploits on Instagram. He recently talked with me about how his job actually works, and — as importantly — he answered some of the questions any fan might have: How do they keep track of the baseball? When do they go to the bathroom? And is sports photography really all it’s cracked up to be?

The Super Bowl is the world championship of American football, but it’s also US culture’s premier marketing opportunity. Nine of the top 10 most-watched American television broadcasts of all time are Super Bowls, a list that is composed of the nine most recent games plus a M.A.S.H. special from 1983. That makes the game a unique chance for brands to put their message in front of a wide audience, a level of exposure that comes at a steep price — $5 million for a 30-second spot this year, a 76 percent increase over a 10-year span.

This naturally leads to the question: Is it worth it? Ad buyers consistently answer yes, but their enthusiasm for the big game is increasingly difficult to square with the basic math of audience growth.

Beyoncé‘s Super Bowl halftime show was a feat, filled with spot-on choreography, incredible fireworks, and a stunning performance overall.

But some people took issue with the political messages of the show — specifically its references to the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney asked, “Is there really anything in America which can exclude race?”

And movie studios knows this better than anyone.

During Super Bowl 50, in the pockets of time between football action and Beyoncé‘s highly anticipated halftime performance, film studios released special TV spots for some of this year’s biggest blockbusters. Think Batman v Superman, Captain America: Civil War, and 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Coldplay headlined the Super Bowl 50 halftime show, but it was Beyoncé who came to play.

When the NFL first announced that Coldplay would be playing the halftime show, a couple simple assumptions emerged: 1) They’d have to pay lip service to past Super Bowls (which they did, via a montage of past performers set to “Fix You”), and 2) Beyoncé would be joining, since Coldplay and Beyoncé had only recently released their collaboration song, “Hymn For the Weekend.“

Super Bowl Sunday, February 7, 2016, was a Beyoncé concert with a side of football and Coldplay. The singer released a surprise song, “Formation,“ the day before the game, absolutely slayed her portion of the halftime show, and then announced a world tour.

Coldplay opened the show with a fun — albeit fairly safe — Technicolor performance featuring rainbows, flowers, and violin-playing children. There’s nothing wrong with rainbows, flowers, and violin-playing children; it’s just that they aren’t Beyoncé.

Super Bowl 50 is underway, and it began with an impressive moment as Lady Gaga opened the game with a splashy performance of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Gaga, decked in a glittery pantsuit and hair threatening to puncture the stratosphere, went for a very theatrical rendition of the song.

And she backed it up by hitting the notes. All the notes. The highlight came toward the end, during the song’s “flag was still there” section. She held one note for so long that I expected bald eagles to fly down from the sky and swoop her up to the heavens.

There are no guarantees as far as whether Super Bowl 50 will be a decent football game, but at the very least there will be commercials.

Oh, how there will be commercials! Big ones, small ones, patriotic ones, relentlessly shameless ones. But even with every company shelling out huge amounts of money for ad space, chances are there will only be a couple of commercials that are truly surprising. Fifty Super Bowls in, we pretty much know what to expect.

Super Bowl weekend is the nexus of chicken wing season. According to the National Chicken Council, Americans will consume 1.3 billion wings in the days of feasting leading up to and including the big game.

That’s quite an accomplishment for a third-tier meat.

Super Bowl 50 is upon us. It will be airing on CBS at 6:30 pm EST (3:30 pm PST) in all its bombastic and corporate-sponsored glory.

In addition to the usual television broadcast, CBS will be live-streaming this year’s game on CBSsports.com. You can also turn to the CBS Sports Channel App on your Roku, Apple TV, Xbox One and/or Windows 10 device.

Most Americans know there’s a risk of concussion from playing football — and most Americans also say they’d let their kids play the sport.

In the week leading up to the Super Bowl in 2016, Vox worked with Morning Consult to poll 1,870 registered voters about their attitudes toward football. We found that 87 percent of respondents had heard about the concussion problem facing the NFL — but 67 percent were comfortable letting their own kids play

Are you a person who dislikes the Patriots? Then you are going to enjoy this map, which, if you look closely, is a map that shows Patriots fans being sorely disappointed.

Let me explain: Google compiled data on how much people from each city searched for flights to San Francisco around this year’s Super Bowl dates. It shows that Denver residents had the highest per capita search volume this football season leading up to their Super Bowl appearance this coming Sunday.

Given the NFL’s huge popularity, there’s something surprising about the average three-hour NFL game: Very little of it involves people playing football.

In the game I charted, 8.3 percent was made up of actual gameplay. For the Super Bowl, that number is probably even lower because it has an especially long halftime (about half an hour, versus 12 minutes during the regular season).

The biggest shift in the evolution of the NFL has been the modern-day emphasis on passing instead of running. The second-biggest shift in the evolution of the NFL is even more tangible: players have gotten truly enormous.

This chart, created by WNYC data journalist Noah Veltman, shows how big the transformation has been:

If you want to buy harder liquor in time for the Super Bowl, you may have to do it before Sunday depending on which state you live in.

Some states have prohibited all sorts of activities — work, loud noises, and horse racing, as a few examples — on Sunday to uphold the day as a time of worship or relaxation. Many of those bans have been repealed or deemed unconstitutional, but some states still prohibit Sunday liquor sales.

This week, millions of Americans are obsessing over a game.

The results of the game will directly affect just a few hundred players and team staff. But millions of spectators will live vicariously through the teams, their hearts pounding so furiously during tense moments that they might literally suffer heart attacks.

The NFL’s concussion crisis has now been going on long enough that it’s easy to get lost in it.

But though the science may be complex, the basic picture is relatively simple.

Among the many polarizing debates in American society, one reigns supreme: double-dipping.

Many people believe that dipping a chip into a shared bowl of dip, taking a bite, and dipping again — termed “double-dipping” in a 1993 episode of Seinfeld — is an abhorrently unsanitary practice. Others, like George Costanza, think this aversion is unscientific, and there’s actually no harm in double-dipping at all.