Faking It at the Watercooler: Super Bowl XLI Primer

Your coworkers and friends will be talking about the big game all week—they mean the Super Bowl, the championship game of American football. Here is the first of several primers that will get you caught up with this year’s Super Bowl and football as a game. You may not know your tight end from your fair catch kick, but we’ll at least get you caught up enough to make small talk.

• The Teams – This year’s Super Bowl is being played by the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts. Each team played well enough in the regular season to advance to the play-offs, a tournament that brought a winner from each “conference,” the two divisions of the National Football League (NFL), who will meet each other in the Super Bowl.

The Bears are from the “National Football Conference,” or “NFC,” while the Colts are from the “American Football Conference,” or “AFC.”

Faking it at the watercooler: AFC founder Lamar Hunt died this year. Suggest that you are “rooting for the Colts,” as it would be fitting for the AFC to “win one for Lamar.”

• The Number – This is the 41st Super Bowl to be played, denoted by the Roman numeral XLI. NFL seasons span two years, so Super Bowls are labeled numerically to prevent confusion. (The bulk of this year’s season was played in 2006, while the final game—the Super Bowl—occurs in 2007).

Faking it at the watercooler: It’s also a Roman numeral because it looks a lot cooler. Despite that, do not say “Super Bowl Ex El Eye,” or even “Super Bowl 41″ when discussing this year’s game—”The Super Bowl” or “the game” will suffice.

• The Location – The Super Bowl is often held in warm climates—it doesn’t matter which team wins, as the location of the Super Bowl is selected years before the NFL season even starts—and this year it is being played in Miami for a record-tying ninth time. It will be held at Dolphin Stadium, although the Miami Dolphins (an NFL team in the AFC) are not in the Super Bowl.

Faking it at the watercooler: You can try to tell your coworkers that this year’s Super Bowl logo uses the same shade of orange as the Miami Dolphin’s logo, but they won’t care. Instead, run a screen by commenting how much you “hate|love Miami,” because it is “hot as hell|a great place to party.”