- The Super Bowl is the most-watched American television event of the year.
- An INSIDER poll revealed that for many fans, football is the least important part of Super Bowl Sunday.
- Men and women were split on the question, with men favoring football over the halftime show, and women leaning more towards the music.
- Follow all of our coverage of Super Bowl LIII here.
The New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams will meet in Atlanta on Sunday in Super Bowl LIII to determine which team will raise the Lombardi Trophy.
It's a game filled with football intrigue, with storylines abound - Bill Belichick vs. Sean McVay, Tom Brady vs. Jared Goff, the Patriots vs. the passage of time.
But despite the plethora of compelling stories surrounding the Super Bowl and the thrilling games that preceded it, for most of those viewing at home, the football will be the least important aspect of the broadcast.
INSIDER ran a SurveyMonkey Audience poll that ran January 22-23, 2019 where we asked respondents a simple hypothetical - Imagine you need to use the restroom during the Super Bowl broadcast. When do you step away? During the game? During the commercials? Or during the halftime show?
Out of 1,083 responses to the question, the most common response was during the game, with 39% of the vote. Just below was during the commercials, which got 37% of the vote. Respondents were least likely to step away from the television during the halftime show, with just 23% choosing to skip Maroon 5 for a bathroom break.
There could be lots of reasons why a large chunk of the populace views the Super Bowl as a televised concert with a strong ad presence that occasionally shows portions of a football game.
First off, the stop-and-go nature of the sport may make it uniquely suited for fans to, well, stop-and-go. The Wall Street Journal notoriously calculated that only 11 minutes of an NFL broadcast was actual play. The halftime show has broad appeal, and at $5.3 million per pop, the advertisements are bringing their best game to the table and can become the highlight of the night for casual football fans.
Men and women were slightly split on when to take breaks. Both were equally likely to honor the sanctity of the commercial air time, mostly keeping with the overall average. Men were more likely to skip out on the halftime show, with 28% of men to 19% of women selecting No. 1 over Maroon 5. Women were more likely to pop out during the game, 44% to the 33% of men.
Since 2010, the Super Bowl has averaged more than 100 million viewers throughout the game. But as our data shows, if there were one part of the evening they had to give up, the most common answer would be to skip the football.
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SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn't try to weight its sample based on race or income. Total 1,116 respondents, a margin of error plus or minus 3.09 percentage points with a 95% confidence level.