From its modest beginnings at the AFL-NFL Championship Game in Los Angeles in 1967, through to this year’s Super Bowl XLIV, Super Sunday has grown exponentially and, in the process, has become a bloated monster. Over the past quarter century or so, Super Sunday has illustrated the ability of a sporting event to offer a distorted and exaggerated version of social reality and social values in America, and it has done so on a grand, glorious and obscene scale.

It is difficult to say precisely when the Super Bowl reached larger-than-life proportions, but certainly by the end of the 1970s it was there. At Super Bowl XV in 1981, a New York Times headline claimed that 70,000 fans made “New Orleans Throb with Super Bowl Mania.” Gerald Eskenazi’s account described a “gridlock” of people in the French Quarter and an influx of “tens of millions” of dollars into the New Orleans economy.

The extravagances of the fans and everyone associated with the game had reached extraordinary proportions. Only the vocabulary created by Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American economist who tracked the habits of the rich in the late 19th century, was capable of fully capturing the scene with such brilliant phrases as “conspicuous consumption,” “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous waste.”

The fact that all of this takes place around a football game would have delighted Veblen, who once observed that football is to education as bullfighting is to agriculture. Indeed, Veblen’s use of the phrases “predatory barbarism,” “pecuniary emulation” and “vicarious consumption” also seem particularly well suited to any description of our distinctive national holiday.

One of the most common measures of excess has been the price of commercial time. At the first Super Bowl, a 30-second commercial sold for $42,500 on CBS and $37,500 on NBC (both networks broadcast the game). By the early 80’s, the price for 30 seconds reached $400,000, and by the end of the decade it was a whopping $800,000. Thirty seconds of advertising reached the $1 million mark in 1995 and climbed to $2.1 million in 2000. In 2007, the price tag was $2.6 million, and estimates for this year range from $2.6 to $3 million.

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There has been lots of discussion recently on the NFL television blackout policy that prohibits televising home games in the home market unless the game sells out 72 hours prior to kickoff.

Some, including Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, have suggested that in this time of economic crisis, when it appears that the number of sellouts will drop, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell should end or suspend the blackout policy.

This is a reasonable sentiment, although one might question if offering more blood and circuses offers a viable solution to America’s economic problems, or if it suggests that the NFL should serve as one more version of the opium of the masses.

Rather than simply offering a temporary respite for the unemployed, now might be a good time to look at the history of the blackout, with a view toward ending this economic privilege enjoyed by the NFL by virtue of a combination of court decisions and legislation.

The relationship between the NFL and television goes back to the early days of television following World War II. A number of teams developed their own television arrangements, and some even had their own regional networks. These spotty operations came and went with uneven results.

The first major experiment with television came in Los Angeles, where the Rams allowed local television to broadcast all of its 1950 home games. Game sponsor Admiral Television agreed to make up any losses in home ticket sales. When attendance dropped by 110,000 from the previous year, Admiral had to produce $307,000. The following year, the Rams televised road games only; as a result, home attendance bounced back to 1949 levels.

With this graphic negative demonstration of the power of television, Commissioner Bert Bell moved in 1952 to centralize control of television contracts — televising games on a regional basis, while instituting a blackout of all home games within 75 miles of the team city. The Justice Department moved immediately to challenge the NFL’s actions. However, in 1953, a federal district judge ruled that the NFL constituted a “unique kind of business,” in which classic economic competition would destroy that business. The court upheld the blackout policy of home games and the territorial blackout which made the regional network solution possible.

At the beginning of the 1960s, under the leadership of the new commissioner, Pete Rozelle, the NFL, rather than individual teams, signed an exclusive TV contract with CBS. The court ruled that the pooling of contracts was an anti-trust violation. With a loss in the courts, the NFL turned to the executive and legislative branches for relief. With the strong support of the Kennedy White House and Congress, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 was passed, authorizing home game blackouts as well as a league-wide television contract. This triumph of the NFL cartel led to even stronger advocacy of the free enterprise system by NFL owners.

This is where the policy stood through the 1960s and the years of warfare with the AFL, which, as a matter of interest, did not have a blackout rule on its telecasts. With the growing popularity of professional football, the merger of the two leagues, and the coming of the Super Bowl, the blackout would again become an issue. Repeated NFL game sellouts led to frustration for home fans who had to travel 75 miles to see their home team play at home — on a television away from home.

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This is always a difficult time of year for me. I am never sure which leaves me with a greater numbness of the brain — the NFL draft or grading final exams.

This is a question that will have to be resolved by greater minds than mine, particularly in my current mental state.

The NFL draft is clearly the biggest non-event on the sports calendar. ESPN created this monster with its ill-advised decision to televise the draft and oversaw its growth with incessant hype. If I had a dollar for every minute that ESPN has expended on it over the past decade, I would retire in luxury. If I had a dollar for every word uttered by Mel Kiper over the same time frame, I would be a billionaire.

Sports talk radio has picked up on the draft and compounded the cacophony geometrically. Never has so much been said by so many about so little.

The other day a colleague asked what could become the most feared question at ESPN: “If Mel Kiper is so good at draft analysis, and capable of critically grading the performance of the New England Patriots who seem to do fairly well drafting, why is Mel not working in the NFL?”

Once the draft ends and the analysis subsides (although it never ends), then it is time to look ahead. Not to the actual football season, but to next year’s draft. I believe it was Tuesday that ESPN.com was already asking if three top college quarterbacks would be first round picks next year. Only an air strike on Bristol, Conn., can save us.

In an effort to trump this madness, the NCAA last week approved two new bowl games. One is the Congressional Bowl, which reports say will feature Navy against a team to be determined by the most effective lobbyists in D.C., or an ACC team. I am not certain which.

The only thing to top this is that St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia) is also getting a bowl game. Because the weather is so bad in Florida in December (lovely, warm, beautiful), the game will be played indoors in the facility affectionately known as The Can. I assume they will set the air conditioner to 20 degrees and pump in some snow to maintain the proper bowl atmosphere.

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