Loving and hating the Super Bowl

We collected some numbers about one of the biggest sports events of the year, and a few of them actually relate to the game, instead of some of the other fun reasons a lot of us will be watching Sunday night. Click through to learn more.

Super Bowl XLVI, held on February 5, 2012, was the most-watched program in U.S. television history: 111.3 million people watched the New York Giants defeat the New England Patriots.

The Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboys share the most appearances at the Super Bowl, with eight each. The two teams went head to head in 1976 at Super Bowl X.

The Pittsburgh Steelers hold the record for most wins, taking the championship six times. Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger celebrates with his teammates after throwing a fourth quarter touchdown against the Arizona Cardinals during Super Bowl XLIII.

The Buffalo Bills, Denver Broncos, Minnesota Vikings, and New England Patriots have each lost the Super Bowl four times. Here, New England head coach Bill Belichick walks off the field after losing to the New York Giants during Super Bowl XLVI.

This Sunday will be the 10th time the Super Bowl has been hosted by New Orleans. A nighttime view shows the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.

Twenty-two percent of HDTV owners bought their set specifically to watch an upcoming Super Bowl game, according to a survey by the Consumer Electronics Association. Additionally, retail spending is expected to be at $12.3 billion for Super Bowl XLVII.

Anheuser Busch spent $248.6 million on advertising for the Super Bowl between 2003 and 2012, the most of any company. Fifty million cases of beer are expected to be consumed during Super Bowl XLVII.

The average cost of a 30-second commercial during the 2012 Super Bowl is $3,442,752.

13.7 million Super Bowl related Tweets were sent during Super Bowl XLVI in 2012.

$93.9 million was wagered on the Super Bowl in Nevada for the 2012 Super Bowl, according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Here, Dennis Pitta of the Baltimore Ravens gets tackled after a catch during the 2013 AFC Championship game.

1.23 billion chicken wing "portions" are expected to be eaten during Super Bowl weekend.

An expected 11 million slices of Domino's pizza will be eaten during Super Bowl XLVI.

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• Gene Seymour: Super Bowl points up how NFL's money machine mars joy of game


• He says that and coverup of players' long-term injury make him ambivalent about football


• Some question whether it's moral to support NFL, especially its overbearing corporate culture


• Seymour: Can we not simply enjoy football? Big Business has overpowered the game

Editor's note: Gene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post.

(CNN) -- As far as I'm concerned, John Matuszak said everything there is to say about professional football back in 1979 when he was playing the role of a bent lineman in "North Dallas Forty."

Matuszak, or "Tooz" as players and fans knew him, was something of a renegade individualist in the National Football League and the movie's script gave him the opportunity to unleash a rebel yell: Embittered by his team's tough loss, and by an assistant coach's lame scolding, his character goes off on the coach, shouting at one point, "Every time I call it a game, you call it a business. Every time I call it a business, you call it a game."

And it's that very dichotomy that looms even larger during Super Bowl week. The media keep insisting there's a game being played Sunday night in New Jersey. But all anybody really cares about is the Business -- as in, the torrents of revenue being raked in from advertising (have you seen that there are now trailers---for the commercials?), the marketing, the gambling and, of course, the partying that goes on not only in New York and New Jersey in the lead-up to the Ultimate Game, but from sea to shining sea Sunday night.

Players know it, for sure—and it continues to embody my own ambivalence about American tackle football. I get caught up in the game's drama, its unexpected twists, its ongoing tension between best-laid game plans and the ever-looming potential for their disruptions. I get caught up, too, with the sideline rants, growls, collisions and screw-ups caught at varied speeds by the wizardry of NFL Films.

But while football's orchestrated aggression and violence may entertain me, my family and friends--and the rest of Living Room America—we're all newly alive to the physical and mental risks these players are taking. How does one stay passionate about football in the face of the grim, steadily mounting number of cases involving ex-players undergoing physical and mental injury and anguish over the sport's long-term effects?

In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, author Steve Almond wondered whether it was immoral to watch and enjoy the Super Bowl while knowing full well that playing the game has caused "catastrophic brain injury ... not as a rare and unintended consequence, but as a routine byproduct of how the game is played." I've expressed similar misgivings here about the flood of disclosures about long-term injury and the manner in which the NFL tried at first to either disregard or demean this peril.

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It's not just the dementia, memory loss and other symptoms that cast shadows over the NFL's gaudy, golden image. This seems the right place to mention that Matuszak, who was so physically imposing as a player that he seemed invincible, died 10 years after "North Dallas Forty" was made. He was only 39 years old and his death was attributed to an overdose of prescription pain medication. Gregg Easterbrook, who publishes the weekly Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN.com, wrote this week that painkiller abuse "may be pro football's next scandal." Over time, watching these players run into each other at top speed while imagining what their minds and lives will be like 20 years afterward could finish me off as a fan.

So could the sheer fatigue of witnessing, year after year, the NFL's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for inhaling money, which only compounds its overbearing corporate culture. I already have little patience with the game's ethos as articulated in such bromides as "Doing Whatever It Takes to Win" or that deathless line that the late, exalted Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi appropriated from a John Wayne movie, "Winning isn't everything, but it's the only thing," which even Lombardi, the man for whom the Super Bowl Trophy is named, came to believe was too simplistic. Such platitudes have made tackle football a useable, if not overused metaphor for what it's like to work, live and, above all, prevail in modern corporate society.

But it's not just a metaphor. Hard-working men such as my father found release, empathy and satisfaction watching the comparably hard work of his beloved New York Giants for decades. It used to be enough for he and millions of fans over the decades of professional football history to watch skilled craftsmen ply their trade, defy the odds, impose their wills, share their joy and passion. It'd be nice, too, if somewhere in the hype and hysteria, we could all calm down enough to see the Super Bowl in such elemental terms.

But as near as I can tell, it's the Business that now holds an overpowering edge over the Game. And what's worse: I can't tell how much longer the Game itself will hold out.

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opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Gene Seymour.

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