The Super Bowl is the biggest show of the year, but football is only part of it

The event is our great annual gathering - but most folks have just incidental contact with the game itself

The guys from 'Full House' reunite for a Dannon Oikos yogurt commercial airing during the Super Bowl.

Around this time every year, someone floats the notion that the Super Bowl is about a football game.

Sure it is. And Labor Day is a tribute to the American working class and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is about fashion.

In the real world, the Super Bowl is about a lot of things. Football is just one.

Mostly, the Super Bowl is about television.

No matter how many times all of us say 'There's nothing to watch on TV,' television remains our national shrine, the closest thing left in the early 21st century to the general store where we pull a couple of chairs around the wood stove.

Super Bowl Sunday is the day we come together in confirmation of that truth.

That's not a slam on football. Football has clearly become our most popular national sport, for a variety of reasons. No other game, not even Supermodel Jell-O Wrestling, could draw anywhere near the 108.5 million people who watched last February's Super Bowl.

But if football brings us together, that's not the same as saying the evening is about football.

It's analogous to the Christmas season. While that holiday dominates our national attention every December, whether we want it to or not, most Americans don't spend the month contemplating the birth of Christ.

If you're a major football fan, or a Seattle Seahawks or Denver Broncos fan, you may well be focused on whether Peyton Manning can do it again Sunday.

But for most of us, that's not the point.

In 2011, the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association (RAMA) commissioned a study by BIGresearch on American attitudes toward the Super Bowl.

As the name of the organization suggests, RAMA's primary goal was to see how much of our Super Bowl interest could be rechanneled into buying stuff.

More on that in a second.

But the survey also asked a big-picture question: What is the most important part of Super Bowl Sunday to you?

The survey found that among those planning to watch, the game itself was the most important part to exactly 47%.

Second place went to the commercials, with 25.8%. Getting together with family and friends, that is, the party, was the most important element to 19.5%, while 7.7% were watching for the halftime show.

Let's pause for a moment to analyze these numbers.

Fewer than half the people watching the game say they care mostly about the game.

Conversely, you could say that more than 80% - people watching for the game, the ads and the halftime show - care most about something on the TV screen.

In fact, even the 19.5% who most care about their party would almost certainly not be having that party if they couldn't gather all those family and friends around the television set.

Point being, Sunday would have a measurably smaller audience if the only thing going on were a football game. Television, what comes with television and what television makes possible - the ads, the parties, the halftime show - are what inflates it into a national event.

It should surprise no one that the Super Bowl has become an occasion to encourage consumption - in this case both literal and in the larger retail sense.

Food?

Super Bowl Sunday has become the country's second-largest food consumption day, trailing only Thanksgiving.

Thexodirectory.com estimates we consume 4,000 tons of guacamole, 14,500 tons of chips and 4,000 tons of popcorn.

We'll eat 1.23 billion chicken wings, making 615 million chickens very unhappy, and drink 325 million gallons of beer.

Back to RAMA, that organization's survey says that between food and game-related merchandise, the average viewer will spend around $60.

RAMA also found that more than 4 million people plan to buy a new TV to watch the game, which certainly underscores the importance we attach to a device we love to insult.

And that's even before we get to the most bizarre TV phenomenon of all, the ads.

Is there another event in television history, or human history for that matter, where tens of millions of people were so eager to hear sales pitches?

It's probably true, of course, that most of us aren't going to jot down our favorite ads and race out to buy the product.

Almost every year Anheuser-Busch is the Super Bowl's biggest advertiser and almost every year a couple of Budweiser or Bud Light spots are among viewers' favorites.

Meanwhile, 25 years ago, Bud sold a quarter of all the beer bought by Americans. Now it's closer to 8%.

But from the frogs to the lizards to the Clydesdales, we still gather by the television to see what Bud is serving.

Partygoers who don't know the red zone from the Red Army put down the guacamole and become an instant jury when the referee calls a timeout and those $4 million spots are teed up.

The next day, unless you live in Denver or Seattle, you're probably more in the conversation if you can talk about the GoDaddy spot than if you can second-guess the post pattern on that critical third down in the fourth quarter.

Or look at it this way: Which do you remember better from the 2007 Super Bowl, the final score or the eTrade baby?

No matter. Whatever catches your eye in the Super Bowl, the critical fact is that you had to be and wanted to be in front of the flat screen to see it.

Until they build a stadium that holds 108 million people and has a snack bar in front of each seat, TV will be the super power on Super Bowl Sunday.

dhinckley@nydailynews.com

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