The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

One day every year the United States celebrates its biggest non-official holiday, Super Bowl Sunday.

The championship game of the National Football League

is almost always the biggest televised audience of the year

and one of the most expensive tickets

for any sporting event in the world.

However, it wasn't always that way.

In fact, it wasn't even called the Super Bowl.

Learn more about the Super Bowl and how it became so big on this episode of Everything Everywhere

Daily. We should probably start this discussion of the Super Bowl with a question which is never

asked amongst Americans and probably befuddles people outside of the United States.

Why do we call big American football games, Bowls?

The answer to this question is actually pretty straightforward.

The very early football stadiums were called bowls because they were shaped like a bowl,

with a single tier of seats.

In particular, the tradition stems from the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California.

When it was built in 1923, the Tournament of Roses game became known as the Rose Bowl game in reference to the stadium.

It was a game which was played between the champions of the Big Ten Conference in the Midwest

and the Big Twelve Conference in the West Coast in college football.

Over time, other cities seeing the success of the Rose Bowl

began hosting special games themselves.

Copying the Rose Bowl they began using the word Bowl to describe their games.

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