Super Bowl Sunday has become a holiday for NFL fans. All of America watches the game, whether they want the game for the game, the halftime show, or the commercials. One fan wants to make a change to the Super Bowl.
16-year-old Frankie Ruggeri from New York says that the Super Bowl should be played on Saturday instead of Sunday. Ruggeri says that fans stay up late on Super Bowl Sunday to watch the game and that makes it hard for people to get up for school and work the next day.
Ruggeri started a petition on Change.org in which he asks for next year’s Super Bowl to be played on a Saturday. The argument that Ruggeri makes for moving the game to Saturday is more people will watch, more people would be able to go to the game in person, and the NFL would make more money.
As of Thursday morning, the petition had more than 20,000 signatures. However, it is unlikely that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell would move the Super Bowl to Saturday.
“That [idea] has been around for a long time, people have talked about that,” Goodell told Kyle Brandt of NFL Network in 2018. “The reason we haven’t done it in the past is simply just from an audience standpoint. The audiences on Sunday night are so much larger. Fans want to have the best opportunity to be able to see the game and we want to give that to them, so Sunday night is a better night.”
Super Bowl SATURDAY!?@KyleBrandt has a few interesting ideas for the @nflcommish…😂
📺: Full interview on the Kyle Brandt Football Experience TODAY at 6pm ET! https://t.co/qb0ae7fdTX
— NFL Network (@nflnetwork) December 21, 2018
So, should the Super Bowl be moved to Saturday? The answer is that the NFL should try it. It wouldn’t hurt. However, there are obstacles to getting the game moved to Saturday. The NFL says rating and viewership are better on Sunday evenings. The Sports Broadcasting Act helped set the NFL broadcasting schedule to Sundays to protect college and high school football.
On the other hand, a 2019 study found that more than 17 million Americans could miss work the day after the Super Bowl. According to a 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, there’s a 41 percent increase in car accidents after the Super Bowl.
The NFL should try moving the Super Bowl to Saturday. There’s nothing to lose in doing it. If it doesn’t work, the game will be moved back to Sunday. The NFL should try it sometime.
