Super Bowl Monday

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Overview

Super Bowl Sunday is a mock holiday used to describe the phenomena of employees missing work in the day following the Super Bowl sporting event, traditionally held on "Super Bowl Sunday," due to a hangover induced during viewings of the game. Many have advocated for the day to be made a national holiday in the United States to avoid low attendance.

Background

It is likely that the phenomena exited prior to online mentions. One of the earliest available references online is a definition for "superbowl hangover" on Urban Dictionary, ^[1] which user bigmoneybri published on February 4th, 2008.

Over the next decade, the joke would continue to be used. One of the earliest online references to the holiday "Super Bowl Monday" came from a February 3rd, 2011 blog post on the Sporting Scribe^[2] blog entitled "Super Bowl Monday: Post Game Work Excuses."

Developments

On February 7th, 2012, the blog "The Post Game" published one of the earliest editorials for making the date a national holiday.^[3] In the piece, they described a 2007 incident in which school bus drivers in Indianapolis, Indiana called out of work en masse, causing the district to cancel classes. They continued to call for a national day of rest, writing:

February is an absolute drag, January sans the new car smell, a cold, dreary month that needs all the help it can get. Starting with a National Recovery and Restoration Day. Hangover Monday. The time has come. It's long overdue. Football fans of the world, unite. We have nothing to lose but our venti cups. And the terrible, insistent blare of our alarm clocks.

Since this time, publications like Men's Journal,^[4] Barstool Sports, ^[5] SB Nation^[6] and more have published editorials advocating for making Super Bowl Monday a national holiday.

On September 4th, 2016, Change.org^[7] user Tiffany Comitalo launched a campaign to make Super Bowl Sunday "come before President's Day," effectively making President's Day "Super Bowl Monday." They wrote:

On average, 1.6 million people call out of work following the Super Bowl. This makes no sense, so let's just make Super Bowl Monday an actual day off by either pushing the start of the NFL season up 1 week, or bumping President's Day one week sooner.

Several years later, in 2019, the Washington Post^[8] reported that 17 million workers were expected to call in sick on the holiday.

The topic has also been a topic of conversation on Twitter, where many have called for making the day a national holiday. For example, on Febaruary 2nd, 2020, recording artist Ryan Hurd tweeted,^[9] "I hearby demand that columbus day be replaced by super bowl monday. This is my best idea yet." The tweet received more than 1,300 likes and 110 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below).