The Super Bowl is such a phenomenal part of US society that there are so many ways to analyze the Super Bowl sociologically.
The Super Bowl is a sociological phenomenon.
Professor Beer explains that the Super Bowl is a great teachable moment using an event that everyone has at least heard of and many students will be watching… or at least at a social event where the game is playing on the television. While many students will be highly engaged in the event, few may have thought about it from a sociological perspective. Below are some interesting resources from sociology and other disciplines that can help reveal the sociology in the Super Bowl. Building off Beer's post, I will weave a number of ways to look at the Super Bowl with a sociological perspective below.
Watching the Super Bowl (For 15 Minutes)
From the Media Ed Foundation, What are you actually watching? If you’re one of the roughly 100 million Americans expected to tune into the Super Bowl this Sunday, you can expect to spend a lot more time being sold stuff than actually seeing the ball in play. As we’ve done annually for a few years now, the Media Education Foundation (MEF) crunched the numbers on last year’s Super Bowl broadcast and found that over the course of the three-and-a-half-hour game, the ball was in play for a mere 15 minutes and 34 seconds, or roughly 7% of the entire broadcast. In contrast, almost a full third of the broadcast – an hour and seven minutes in all – was dedicated to ads, branded content, and other commercial clutter. CBS, which charged upwards of $5.25 million for a 30-second spot, or roughly $175,000 per second, raked in more than $380 million from all of this in-game advertising.
Social Pressure: Functional or False Consciousness?
We attend Super Bowl watch parties because that is where we can be social with others. The pressures of socialization strongly encourage us to go hang out with everyone else watching the game even if we don’t like, care about, or have any clue about the game. Try explaining to someone that you don’t want to go because “the Super Bowl promotes a violent hegemonic patriarchy and the commercialization of our leisure time (explained above).” I promise that you will at least get a weird look. One site claims that only 5% of viewers watch the game alone and the average number of people at a Super Bowl party is 17. This data would need some critical analysis before being taken to heart, but it is interesting. We watch the Super Bowl collectively, socially. Rejecting that opens you up to social sanctions.
Super Bowl Super Spreader - Sociology of Health, Medicine and the Big Game
We watch it together so much that cities with teams in the Super Bowl see a rise in flu deaths due to the increased interaction of people. Watching the Super Bowl together generates a sense of social cohesion to such a degree that, à la Durkheim, researchers have found that suicide rates on more recent Super Bowl Sundays are lower than the Sunday before and after the Super Bowl.
Symbolic Interaction and the Drama(turgy) of the Event
There is a socially determined way you watch the Super Bowl and cheer on your team. Watching the Super Bowl is different from watching a Broadway musical. Cheering on your team involves active support as the event is occurring. We yell, “go, go, go!” when our team’s running back breaks away from a tackle. We may even get so excited that we spill some beer or knock the chips over. We don’t do the same at many other social events (like musicals, our classes, or riding the bus), even if you feel like you wanted to.
Learning Gender through Football
The Society Pages own Doug Hartman has an excellent review piece in Contexts from back in 2003 examining sociologists’ explanation of the role of sports, football in particular, in socializing us into what it means to be “manly”. As Hartman writes, “Sports provided them, as young boys and teens, with a reason to get together, to engage with other boys (and men), and in doing so to begin defining what separates boys from girls: how to act like men.” Boys play sports in large part because it is where they can be social with other boys. As a child, it is also an opportunity to spend time with older brothers and fathers. See the full article for many more roles that sports play in maintaining masculinity and a good list of recommended resources.
Ethnographic Super Bowl Watching: Watch Gender and How We Watch
The Super Bowl is also a great place to watch gender roles in action. To demonstrate the sanctions around gender roles ask female students to see what happens when they cheer on a team with the same intensity and aggression as the male students in the room. Do others respond to such aggressive cheering by the females with, “Damn Jane, take it easy.” When females become “too aggressive” or impassioned, do they breach the boundaries of what it means to be feminine? Are they subject to subtle or overt verbal sanctions?
Gender and What We Watch
Are men and women watching the same content of the Super Bowl broadcast? John Clark, Artemisia Apostolopoulou and James Gladden’s 2009 article, “Real Women Watch Football: Gender Difference in the Consumption of NFL Super Bowl Broadcast” examines this question and we can draw sociological conclusions from it. Women viewers ranked the commercials, a celebrity singing the national anthem, and the halftime entertainment as more important than the average male viewer who rated the teams playing, the competitiveness of the game, and the postgame show as more important. Women viewers were more likely to agree that the performance at halftime enhances their enjoyment of watching the Super Bowl and the main reason they watch the Super Bowl is to see the halftime entertainment. On average, men even reported that they thought the halftime entertainment made the actual game unnecessarily long.
In Beauty Brands Bust into Super Bowl Ads in Pursuit of the Taylor Swift Effect, Forbes reports that some of the ads that will premiere in 2025 will include cosmetic and beauty ads...13% of Americans were more interested in football because of Taylor Swift...interest was greater among younger age groups. For example, among Generation Z respondents 24% said they had greater interest and with millennials it was 20%. A recent survey from Similarweb, a data and analytics company, found nearly 20% cited the Taylor Swift relationship with Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce as a key reason in tune into this year’s Super Bowl. “By 2024,” says Whitler, marketing professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, “you have more (product) categories represented and more diffusion. More variety of advertisers promoting their products in part because they’re seeing greater value in reaching this broader audience.
Consumerism and Media as Agent of Socialization
Then there are the ads. The next day when people talk about the Super Bowl they often talk about their favorite ads. The media certainly continues to cover the ads as content during the following week and beyond. The ASA TRAILS teaching resource has an activity posted by Carla D Ilten, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Drawing on the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, the activity ties in Super Bowl ads to Critical Theory.
Her abstract explains more:
“In this media activity, students will learn to watch advertisements through the lens of Critical Theory. Students will discover how ‘the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry’ and distinguish the fun and amusement of this genre from the cultural messages of inclusion and exclusion it entails. This media activity is intended as an in-class exercise that follows a lecture on Horkheimer and Adorno’s text ‘The Culture Industry. Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944). It uses a hit list of ’10 funniest Superbowl commercials’ to facilitate students’ active recognition and understanding of central Critical Theory concepts such as the ‘commodity character of culture,’ consumerism, totality and alienation, as well as amusement, fun, entertainment as vehicles for repressing resistance and mitigating powerlessness.”
However, the social acceptance of football is changing. As the correlation between brain injuries and football grows, former players, parents, and fans are questioning if the sport is worth it. Documentaries, including Frontline’s League of Denial, and based-on-real-life dramas, such as Concussion starring Will Smith, have emerged in the media. Former players are also speaking out. For example, star player Chris Borland walked away from a $3 million contract after just one year out of fear of long term damage to his own brain. He states on the Frontline website (also see a related video): “The idea that just the basis of the game, repetitive hits, could bring on a cascade of issues later in life, that was, it changed the game for me,” he says. “I couldn’t really justify playing for money and I think what I wanted to achieve put me at too great a risk so I just decided on another profession.” Organizations have formed, such as, Mothers Against Concussions and parents are thinking long and hard before letting their children play football. See here, here, and here for articles examining parents’ dilemma.
Others are even beginning to argue the game has become immoral. Dave Bry wrote in The Guardian, “… it’s not the players who I am calling immoral. The onus is on us, the fans (and, more directly, the team owners) who pay the players to hurt themselves for our enjoyment. Huge amounts of money, let-your-parents-retire-and-set-up-the-next-generation-of-your-family-to-go-to-college money, ‘make him an offer he can’t refuse’ money. The money is there, so if one 20-year-old does muster up the sense to say no, there’ll be 20 others waiting in line to say yes.”
Based on increasing concerns about brain injuries and long-term damage, normative sanctions of shaming have begun to crack the all-American image of football. A class action lawsuit was brought on behalf of retired players and the NFL and the NCAA. The NFL agreed to pay up to $5 million to each retired player that had suffered brain injuries. The idea that at least some of the players in the upcoming Super Bowl will go on to have life-endangering brain injuries will certainly loom in part over this year’s game. Unless the rules are changed or technology develops “safe” helmets, the game of football and subsequently the Super Bowl will begin to take on additional social meanings, ones tainted compared to the raucous celebrations of today.
A Super Bowl of Guacamole; Environmental Sociology and Avocados
Produce Pay explains the incredible impact of the Super Bowl on avocado industry including that twenty percent of annual avocado sales in the US are for the Super Bowl!
ESPN explains that avocados are one way that the Super Bowl affects a global economy;
In the Mexican state of Michoacán, celebrations around this time of year center on the guacamole bowl instead of the Super Bowl. That's because each year, the premier sporting event in the U.S. serves as the main source of income for hundreds of families south of the border who ensure that 138,000 tons of avocados are ripe in time for kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday....About 80% of the avocados shipped to the U.S. from Mexico come from Michoacán. Kickoff for Super Bowl avocado season in the state -- located in west-central Mexico about 1,600 miles from Las Vegas -- took place six weeks before the actual game. Entire populations dedicated their days to several facets of production: planting, picking, packing and everything therein before the fruit embarked on its U.S. journey.
North American Vision and Bill Petro explain the history of the avocado and the Super Bowl and the connection to economic structures (NAFTA) and marketing.
Sociology of the Environment and Super Bowl Avocados
However, the AP reports about climate change and the increasingly less stable conditions to produce the massive amounts of avocados in the state of Michoacán. And the desire to meet the market demands of avocados is damaging the environment (deforestation and water resource depletion) and adding to the climate change.
The western state of Michoacan, which supplies almost 90% of the creamy textured fruit used in the Super Bowl snack, has suffered a hotter, drier climate that has led to a lack of water in growing areas.
Lakes in the state are drying up: Desperate avocado growers send tanker trucks down to suck up the last water, or divert streams, to feed their thirsty orchards, sparking conflicts. The state received about half the rain it normally gets last year, and reservoirs are at about 40% of capacity, with no rain in sight for months.
Meanwhile, some growers are illegally cutting down pine forests that feed the water system to plant more avocados. To top it all off, a nother American obsession — tequila — is starting to cause problems too....“Many people in Mexico have lost their forests and water because of the 304 million pounds of avocados we’ll be eating on Super Bowl Sunday,” said Stephanie Feldstein, the center’s director for population and sustainability. “Our obsession with avocados has a horrific hidden cost.
Ending [the fight against] Racism; The NFL's Participatory Obedience 2025
NPR's Code Switch reported on the NFL's decision to end their END RACISM campaign in 2025, the same year that President Trump is attending the game and also ending all DEI initiatives in the government. This concerns scholars who study democracy; Some democracy advocates worry that too many of our civic institutions are softening their postures toward Trump to avoid getting on his bad side, pointing to what the historian Timothy Snyder calls "anticipatory obedience:"
"Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."
The NFL introduced its “Inspire Change” platform in 2018, with end-zone slogans such as “End Racism,” “It Takes All of Us,” “Stop Hate,” “Choose Love,” and “Vote” becoming part of the league’s broader diversity and inclusion messaging in 2020, the Athletic reports. These changes were implemented in response to nationwide BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The issue of racial injustice had been a talking point in the NFL since 2016, when former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick (For more on Colin Kaepernick see my 2017 post about it) began kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racism, sparking widespread debates.
And the END RACISM end zone message has been in the end zone since 2021 as an anti-racism response to the murder of George Floyd.
Kendrick Lamar's 2025 Halftime PerformanceKendrick Lamar's performance showed that he was aware of the gravity of the moment in both Trump attending and the President's past history with the NFL and racism as well as the history of participatory obedience.
Double Consciousness
As the show begins, Lamar launches into Squabble Up, a song BET explains, ...that speaks to the tension and resistance found in everyday Black life, Lamar immediately set the tone for the night.
That tone was
...confronting uncomfortable truths about race, power, and identity in America. His lyrics often serve as a mirror, forcing listeners to see the country for what it is—not the sanitized, revisionist version often presented in history books, but the raw, unfiltered reality of Black life in America.... At a time when diversity programs are being dismantled and affirmative action is being gutted, Lamar stood as proof that Black excellence does not require permission.
At a time when voter suppression is being enacted in states with large Black populations, Lamar’s performance was a call to action, reminding us that our voices—whether in music, sports, or the ballot box—cannot and will not be silenced....Lamar’s halftime show was a direct response to the times we live in. It was a performance rooted in history, shaped by struggle, and fueled by the unrelenting spirit of Black America.
For years, America has tried to erase us—from slavery to segregation, from redlining to mass incarceration, from voter suppression to attempts to erase Black history from the classroom. But history has shown, time and time again, that we are unerasable. You can cancel every program. You can roll back every policy. You can attempt to silence every voice. But you cannot erase us. Black people are America. Not just a part of it—not just contributors—but the very essence of what makes this country what it is.
And that last important point - that Black people are America despite the attempts to erase them from the culture creates what W.E.B. Dubois called "Double Consciousness," or being forced to see yourself through two lenses - as a person who is both American and Black.
Uncle Sam; A Structural Functional Symbol
“The revolution ’bout to be televised,” Kendrick said before getting into GNX’s “squabble up,” adding, “You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” Later, Jackson as “Uncle Sam” scolded him, calling the performance “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto” and inquiring about whether Kendrick “really knew how to play the game” before imploring him to “tighten up!” The exchange echoed the hostility that Kendrick and so many other Black artists have experienced in the music industry and in this country more broadly. Lamar then transitioned into “Humble,” the lead single from his triple-platinum-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning Damn.
Then, it happened: As Uncle Sam started to tell Lamar that he was “almost there” and not to mess things up, the opening notes of “Not Like Us” started to play, and Kendrick dropped the following bars before giving the crowd the release that was included with the purchase of their Super Bowl ticket: “It’s a cultural divide, I’ma get it on the floor / 40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music / They tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” The lines call back to the third verse of “Not Like Us,” when Kendrick proffers a lesson about Atlanta’s history as a “Black Mecca” and the broader system that exploits Black culture.
Uncle Sam represents America - or at least the structures within it that seek to control and profit off minority artists like Lamar. It's the NFL that bows to Trump by eliminating their call to End Racism; it's the media like Fox that seeks to sanitize performances like this halftime show; it's the law that is used to silence artists like Drake's lawsuit attempts to. Lamar attacks these structures so ingeniously by infiltrating them and being the performer that the structures gave the stage to.
Red Lining
Lamar subtly recreates redlining as his dancers in white are surrounded by an invisible wall tinted red by lights and red dancers around it.
He was defiant, proud, vindictive, playful and celebratory. He was pro-Black and subversive, trolling and joyful, and through all the expectations and fighting and nastiness, he was ultimately victorious. Lamar was aspirational, inviting us along with him.
Lamar is always pushing up against what it means to be Black and American. Which is why the very first thing we saw in his halftime performance was actor Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam narrating the showcase as well as a voice in Lamar’s head, telling him to play it safe and humble himself for America.
When Lamar opened the show with his homies hopping out of his Buick GNX, a metaphor for his neighborhood and homies invading Americana, he’s admonished by Uncle Sam to humble himself. And when Lamar and his dancers formed a human American flag on the field during his smash hit “Humble,” it was clear there was going to be a larger statement about the country when it needs a mirror the most.
Lamar wanted to deliver a message and a series of messages aimed directly at Black folks who are yearning for a place to rest our hearts. It’s what he has done so brilliantly in the midst of his feud with Drake. Part of Lamar’s attack on his Canadian nemesis has been positioning Drake as an extension of an establishment whose goal is to tear down Black folks. Yes, Drake is a colonizer according to Lamar, but it’s not just about that. It’s about getting rid of all colonizers. So when Lamar dropped his most powerful easter egg of the performance — Serena Williams — it was a wink to a particularly Black audience.
Williams has been the target of Drake and America at multiple times in her career. She’s been unfairly targeted for daring to be great, or, in Drake’s case, disinterested in a relationship. During the performance of “Not Like Us,” Williams danced on the field — a middle finger to Drake and timely reminder that Lamar defended her, and the culture, on the song. But if you recall, back in the 2012 Olympics, Williams celebrated her Gold medal by c-walking on the court. The move, an homage to her Compton roots and something Black folks had been doing for ages, became another opening for attack as far too many people accused her of being “ghetto” and too cocky for daring to shout out her hometown and rejoice in victory. Lamar gave Williams space to reclaim that dance as he was rapping about the ills of folks who don’t belong in the same universe as Black excellence trying to tell us what to do.
Lamar performed between the end zones where the slogan “End Racism” used to be. A few days before the Super Bowl, the NFL made the decision to remove the slogan, coinciding with a nationwide rebuke of DEI, where Black folks’ accomplishments are questioned as much as ever before. To perform at a halftime show for an organization like the NFL implies a tacit complicity in that type of empire, even in the face of raised Black fists at the 20-yard line. And for a certain sector of the audience, nothing Lamar says or does will erase that complicity.
The dancers, dressed in red, white and blue, created formations that resembled the American flag. Times of India reported that at one point, Lamar himself stood at the center, seemingly dividing them, a visual metaphor for America's ongoing racial and political divisions.
The Daily Mail analyzes the meaning of the performance here:
At the top of his set, Kendrick, 37, appeared to make a dig at President Donald Trump, who was among the high-profile attendees in the crowd. Addressing the audience, Kendrick said: 'The revolution is about to be televised; You picked the right time but the wrong guy.' The multi-Grammy award-winner was of course referring to Gil Scott-Heron's acclaimed 1971 poem, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which speaks to the Black power movement of the 1960s. However, Kendrick's mention of the 'wrong guy' sent the internet into a frenzy, immediately leading them to believe he was referencing January's US Election.
Kendrick's back-up dancers were dressed in red, white and blue, in reference to the American flag. During the rapper's track Humble, they stood in formation on the stage making the flag much clearer to see. At first, the dancers were unified, but seconds into the track they divided in half with Kendrick standing in-between them. Some eagle-eyed audiences noted this and deduced that the group was split to show how the country is politically and culturally divided. Others noticed that all of Kendrick's dancers were Black, which was an apparent nod to America's history of slavery. 'Black folk representing the American flag because modern America was built on our labor… Kendrick I see you,' said one. Another wrote: 'Kendrick creating the American flag and then splitting it in half to symbolize the country's divineness... the amount of amazingly executed political symbolism in this one performance… I'm going to have to sit down with a notebook and pen.' A third said: 'Kendrick making the American flag out of black men was absolutely beautiful, and the message was clear. 'Black people built America, and the same people that he was embracing are now calling the performance boring.'
Ernest Owens at The Root says that Kendrick Lamar's halftime show was a coded indictment of the current state of affairs in America. ...the performance was an artistic statement about the current state of America as President Donald Trump (presumably) watched live. Having legendary actor Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam narrating the show (and serving as Lamar’s subconsciousness) was intentional. Having an all Black cast of dancers and performers dressed in red, white, and blue was also intentional....
During his set, parts of the Super Bowl crowd were lit up to formulate the sentence “WARNING WRONG WAY” – a symbolic message of where our nation is currently headed.In another sequence, the wide gap in between his background dancers (all dressed in either red, white, or blue jumpsuits) forming a disjointed American flag clearly implied a divided country.
All of this after the NFL itself decided to drop their “End Racism” banner on their end zones isn’t a coincidence.... The greatest rapper of our generation did it all: He put the nail in the coffin of an industry heavyweight and more importantly reminded the rest of America that the bigots currently occupying the White House are not like us.
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