Why the Super Bowl Uses Roman Numerals -- and Why It Shouldn't
Essential football trivia you can share with your friends to make you the smartest person in the room -- or the Zoom!
Super Bowl LIX is this Sunday, and you know what that means.
That’s right. Football fans all over America, probably the inhabited universe, will be stumbling over themselves trying to translate the Roman numerals LIX into actual numbers you can say out loud.
Let’s get one thing straight: No matter how weary you are of the Kansas City Chief’s once again showing up for The Big Game, and no matter how tired you may be of Taylor Swift cheering on her boo, Travis Kelce, the NFL championship game should not be pronounced Super Bowl Licks.
When you see LIX, you are instantly supposed to understand it stands for 59.
Like that’s going to happen.
And LIX is among the least confusing Super Bowl numerals. How about Super Bowl XXXVII (37) or Super Bowl XLVIII (48)? At least next year’s will drop down to two numerals: LX.
(It’s so easy to make fun of this. Check out this sketch by Juston McKinney, who, by the way, will be at the Off the Hook Comedy Club in Naples March 12-13.)
So, why do we use Roman Numerals (which went out of fashion a few centuries after Julius Caesar was stabbed XXIII times?)
The National Football League says it’s to avoid confusion. They say this without a trace of irony.
The problem is, the professional football season drags on for so long that the annual championship game flops over into the next year. So the 2024 game is played in 2025, and record keepers would get all tangled up trying to keep that straight if you identified Super Bowls by the years they were played.
So, starting with the fifth Super Bowl, Super Bowl V, Roman numerals were introduced.
But not always. The marketing executives decided that Super Bowl 50 couldn’t use Roman numerals. It would have been Super Bowl L, and that would create a problem, L standing for “Loss” in the win-lose columns.
As if Super Bowl LIX isn’t equally embarrassing.
And if the NFL thinks Roman numerals are so swell, how come they’ve never played in Rome? Maybe someday they will. If they decided to do that in the upcoming season, they’d be playing in the year MMXXV.
For more on the Super Bowl and how to ensure you have all the essential items you need to throw an epic Super Bowl party, check out my column in Florida Weekly, which has just rolled off the presses. Here’s the link:
J.C. Bruce is a journalist and author of The Strange Files series of mysterious novels (available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, our amazing Canadian friends at Kobo, other online booksellers, and at selected libraries). He holds dual citizenship in the United States of America and Florida, and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from Miami’s Lightgate Institute of Extranormal Studies, which he totally made up for his book Strange Timing — recently named Florida Book of the Year.
Sponsored by TROPIC PRESS, publisher of The Strange Files Series of Mysterious Adventures.
