Superb Owl

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Part of a series on Super Bowl XLIX. [View Related Entries]

About

Superb Owl refers to an anagram of the National Football League sporting event the "Super Bowl." The phrase is used to post memes and pictures of owls in nature during the game to disrupt discussions about football.

Origin

While it likely existed offline prior to its internet usage, the earliest known posting about "superb owl" was by Twitter ^[1] user @shawnw on February 3rd, 2008 (shown below). That day, the tweeted, "Superb Owl party tonight!"

Spread

On February 6th, 2011, Redditor ^[2] bennybuckethead launched the /r/superbowl subreddit. The rules for the subreddit state, "(1) Image posts must contain an owl (2) Text posts must be about owls." However, unlike other Superb Owl conversation, the subreddit does not only activate during the Super Bowl, which happens annually in late-January or early-February (example posts below, left and center). On February 4th, 2018, Redditor^[3] TheBigBadBurritos posted what became the subreddit's most popular post as of February 2019, receiving more than 59,000 points (85% upvoted) and 200 comments (shown below, right).

In 2014, a late-night comedian used the anagram on an episode of The Colbert Report, mockingly using the term to get around the NFL's copyright of the term "Super Bowl" (screen capture below).^[6]

On February 19th, 2016, "superb owl" was defined on Wikionary, ^[5] an online dictionary, as "the Super Bowl, in a non-trademark-infringing manner, due to the extreme litigiousness of the National Football League."

On January 31st, 2019, "The Superb Owl" was a category on the quiz game show Jeopardy! ^[7]

Over time, people began differentiating between Superb Owl posts and Super Bowl posts by using the hashtag #SuperbOwl, intentionally capitalizing the letter "O" in the tag. For example, on February 2nd, 2019, National Geographic tweeted^[4] a GIF of an Owl with the caption "Soon. #SuperbOwlSunday." The post received more than 3,000 retweets and 9,000 likes in three days (shown below).

In 2019, the phrase grew to wider national attention as numerous media outlets covered the hashtag and usage, including USA Today,^[8] The New York Times,^[9] Time^[10] and more.