Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 141 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope everyone is doing excellent and I hope that you're ready to practice your English listening with another episode.
Today I'm I'm going to talk about a really relevant topic, which is the Super Bowl.
I'm sure most of you have heard of this before.
This is the biggest sporting event in the US.
This is the final game of of the NFL, the National Football League.
So this event, I think, will take place maybe two days or so before this episode is released.
And so this will be a topic that a lot of people are talking about.
So someone requested this topic and I thought it would be a good idea to talk a little bit about this, because this is an element of American culture and I'm sure it will be educational for you to learn about the Super Bowl.
We'll see you next time and the link to that is below in the episode description.
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All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time!
Okay, let's talk about the Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl this year in 2024 will take place on February 11th.
And I think this episode will be released on the 13th, if I'm not mistaken.
So the Super Bowl probably just happened.
So people might be talking about it.
You might have heard about it in the news or on social media.
And the first thing that is important to know about the Super Bowl is is that it's the biggest national sporting event in the US.
By far, I think.
When we say by far, we're saying by a wide margin.
It means that this is in first place and the second place one is far behind.
So the Super Bowl is by far the biggest national sporting event in the U.S.
And football, American football, of course, is the most popular sport in the U.S.
This is the sport that many people watch.
More people watch this sport than any other sport.
So it's become maybe the new national sport if we have one.
I don't think we have one in the US, but if there were a national sport, it would probably be football.
Whereas a hundred years ago...
It would have been baseball.
So I think I'm not a big sports history buff.
So I can't tell you for sure, but I would say so.
By the way, we can use the word buff.
To talk about someone who is a fanatic of a certain topic, a certain, let's say, field or discipline, or something that they know a lot about teaching.
Oftentimes, we use this with history.
If someone is a history buff, that means they know a lot about history.
They consume a lot of educational material about history.
They get excited about the topic.
That's a history buff.
So I'm not a sports history buff, so some of my opinions might not be 100 accurate, but I think that baseball was the national sport in the past, and now it seems like it's football.
So this sporting event, the Super Bowl, is so popular that many, many non football fans also watch it.
Even people that don't follow football at all, people that haven't watched a single game all season, they might still watch the Super Bowl.
So you can imagine how popular this event is.
And another thing to remember is that most Americans only watch national sports.
This means that they only watch sports that are played in leagues that are with only American teams, or sometimes one Canadian team.
Toronto sometimes has a team that is part of our national league for different sports.
But for the most part just American teams.
And And so, if you think about our major sports like football and basketball and baseball, the games that people watch in the US are games that are played between two American teams.
The New York Yankees versus the Boston Red Sox or the New England Patriots versus the Kansas City Chiefs.
Right.
There are two American teams, not teams from different countries.
And this is different from the rest of the world in most cases, because in most countries around the world, soccer is the biggest sport and one of the most exciting things about soccer throughout the year is that there are international competitions played right.
Like the World Cup, for example, and many other international competitions.
So Americans don't usually watch these, and our sports don't usually involve international teams, except for Toronto sometimes.
Besides that, it's just... an American league with American teams with Americans watching.
Obviously, people from other countries sometimes watch our sports as well.
But in terms of what Americans watch, Americans watch American sports for the most part.
If you watch international sports as an American, you're in the minority.
So you can imagine that this sporting event, which is, for an American sport, the most popular one that even non-football fans are interested in watching, in terms of this final game, the Super Bowl, you can imagine how many people watch this event.
It's very, very popular in the U.S., And you might ask, what is the Super Bowl, really?
What is this?
Well, as I mentioned, it's the final game of the NFL.
And how it works is that There are 32 different NFL teams, if I'm not mistaken.
I'm just going off of my prior knowledge.
I didn't look this up, so hopefully I'm not mistaken here.
But from what I remember...
Back in the days when I used to watch football, there are 32 teams in total.
And these teams are divided into two conferences, we call them.
The AFC, the American Football Conference, and the NFC, the National Football Conference.
And each of these conferences has four divisions, divided based on the geography of the us, so the north, the south, the east and the west.
So you have an afc west division and an nfc west division, and an afc north division and an nfc north division, etc.
And so all of these different teams in these different divisions, in these two conferences, they play against each other throughout the regular season.
And then we have the playoffs after the regular season.
The playoffs refer to the phase after the regular season that only certain teams qualify for, only the top teams.
And then during the playoffs, there are different rounds in which teams are eliminated until finally there are only top two teams remaining one team from the AFC and one team from the NFC.
And these two teams play against each other in the Super Bowl.
So that's how the teams are determined who will play in the Super Bowl.
And then whoever wins the Super Bowl is the champion of the whole NFL, right?
They are the winners for that season.
So this is the case in most sports.
I think at the end of every season, there's one team that is considered the champion.
And that's the case for the Super Bowl.
Whoever wins is the champion for that year.
And there are some important differences to consider when talking about American sports like football and soccer in other countries.
That will also help you understand the excitement of the Super Bowl.
So one really big difference that you can see in American sports when you compare them to soccer in most countries.
This is not always the case, but I think most of the time it is.
That is that in American sports there's usually a different team at the top, a different champion at.
It doesn't always happen like that, of course, but most years the champion is a different champion from the previous year's champion.
And why is that?
Well, in American sports, of course we have the money factor.
Different owners of different teams have different amounts of money to spend and of course that's a factor, but it's not as big of a factor as it is in soccer in other countries.
As you might know, in most countries there are certain soccer clubs that have tons of money and then other clubs have very little money, and the clubs with a lot of money always win.
They're always the champions.
There aren't really a lot of other teams with little money that compete for the championship every year.
Usually it's just one of the rich clubs that wins.
Again, that's not always the case, but that's the case most of the time.
In the U.S., it doesn't quite work like this in most of our sports.
There's always what we call a draft.
So, for example, the NFL draft is this event in which the different teams they draft or they choose different teams college football players.
So the big college football stars eventually go to the NFL, and the way that they do that is through this draft, and so the different teams in the NFL, they are ranked according to how well or how poorly they did the previous year.
So, for example, let's say that one team was the worst team in 2023.
They were in last place.
They had the lowest amount of wins.
Well, that team is going to get the first pick in the NFL draft the next season.
So they were the worst team that year.
But then next year. they get to choose their first college football player before any other team.
So basically, they get the best guy, the best college football player.
So what happens is that these bad teams they suddenly get a really good college star that's going to make their team better, and this process, and other factors as well, help to balance out the different teams so that it's not always the same teams that are good and the same teams that are bad.
There are always cycles where a team is good for a season or a couple seasons, and then they're bad, and then they're good again, and then they're bad.
And that happens a lot more in football than it does in soccer in other countries.
So because of all of that, the Super Bowl is often extra exciting in this context because many times it involves a team competing.
That was bad during the previous years.
So maybe there was a team that didn't even make the playoffs one year, but then the next year they are in the Super Bowl.
And so it's really exciting for that city's fans, because they went from being bad to suddenly they're competing for the ultimate prize, and so you can imagine the excitement for many cities when their team makes it to the super bowl, even though they've never won it before or they were really bad the last few years.
So it makes it more exciting.
And, knowing all that, you also know that if a team does win multiple Super Bowls year after year, you know that that team is really special, because that doesn't normally happen.
So you might know about the New England Patriots back when Tom Brady was on the team and how they won Super Bowl after Super Bowl.
After Super Bowl, many different Super Bowls.
And we would call that a dynasty, right?
In American sports, when one team wins multiple championships in a short period of time, we say that that team has a dynasty.
And dynasties are very special in the U.S. because they don't happen often.
It's not like in different soccer leagues around the world, where the same team can win four or five times in a row and it's just normal.
It's expected.
Not in the U.S.
That's very rare, and so it's special when that happens.
So about the Super Bowl itself...
You might already know this.
It's very flashy.
That just means that there's an excess of spectacular elements, right?
There are a lot of amazing things.
It's a whole show.
It starts with the national anthem where someone sings our national song, right?
The Star Spangled Banner.
And usually it's some celebrity or famous singer or someone.
I don't know.
But it's very dramatic usually.
And, by the way, this national anthem is sung here at all of our sporting events, our national ones, even local sporting events.
It's not just during international games against other countries.
No, even at a local high school basketball game, they'll probably sing the national anthem before the game.
This is an important element of the sporting event.
And then, of course, there's the big halftime show during the Super Bowl in the middle of the game.
The teams take a break and there's this halftime show.
It's basically a concert.
There's some famous musician or someone that puts on this amazing show for all of these fans.
And it's very flashy.
It's very spectacular.
And the commercials are also important during the Super Bowl.
This is when you'll see the funniest and most creative commercials advertisements for different companies.
And this makes it more fun for non football fans who are watching the Super Bowl.
Some people get excited for the commercials more than the football game.
And people will often talk about these commercials afterwards.
Hey, did you see the commercial for blah, blah, blah company?
Because the commercials are very different during the Super Bowl.
The companies that advertise during the Super Bowl purposefully put their best effort and spend the most amount of money on these particular commercials, and people like them.
So that makes it fun for some people.
And people have Super Bowl parties.
This is really common.
People invite their friends and their family members over.
They watch the game.
Sometimes I say this because many people go to Super Bowl parties and and they don't actually watch the game, they just talk and socialize and eat, especially chips and guac guac is a way to say guacamole here so people might just treat it as a social event.
They might not even care about who wins.
They just go for the socializing and the food and maybe the commercials.
So, as you can see, this is very different from, let's say, an important soccer match, because Pretty much everyone who goes to watch an important soccer match is watching the match.
They're not there to socialize, right?
But with the Super Bowl, it's a social event.
The sport is sometimes important, sometimes not so important.
Usually it's a mix.
Usually some people are really into the game when they go to these parties and some people aren't.
And they're the ones standing and talking in the kitchen or whatever.
So you have a mixture there.
So Super Bowl parties are very common and a lot of people look forward to them.
All right, I think that's pretty much all I wanted to say about the Super Bowl.
Hopefully you learned a little bit about this tradition here in the US and maybe some of you watched the Super Bowl.
I don't know.
I'm not going to watch it because I'm not interested in football, but a lot of other Americans are interested in this.
So hopefully this episode was good practice for your listening.
And remember that if you feel ready to practice with real English spoken at normal speed, make sure to sign up to become a Listening Time family member.
Thank you.
And it's great practice for you to start listening to and understanding two people talking to each other.
So the link is also in the description down below.
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All right.
Thank you for listening to this episode, and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
