16-Year-Old New Yorker Starts Petition to Move the Super Bowl to a Saturday
The Super Bowl has long been the most popular sporting event in America, but if you ask 16-year-old Frankie Ruggeri, there’s one glaring thing wrong with the annual game — it’s scheduled on a Sunday.
While the high school student from New York loves watching the Super Bowl, the one thing he dislikes is having to go to school the next morning, he told WHAM. So he recently started a Change.org petition to persuade the NFL into moving their storied championship game from Sunday to Saturday, and more than 33,000 people have signed it as of Friday morning.
“He was persistent, very persistent, and he really believed it was a good cause,” Ruggeri’s father, Frank Ruggeri, told the news station. “So I said, ‘Frankie, go for it.’ “
In it, Ruggeri says the change in schedule would help to bring in more money for the league, gain more television viewership, and allow more people to travel to the host city for the game.
But there are a few more reasons to back up Ruggeri’s argument.
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A study by The Workforce Institute found that more than 17 million employees planned to skip work the Monday following the 2018 Super Bowl. In a separate study published in 2003, the New England Journal of Medicine also found that there’s a 41 percent increase in traffic accidents following the Super Bowl.
Moving the game to a Saturday would allow fans more time to recover the next day, Ruggeri’s thinking goes.
According to comments on his petition, Ruggeri is on to something.
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“It’s about freakin’ time [the] NFL did this if they can’t move to Saturday, at least make kickoff earlier,” said one commenter.
“Either move it to Saturday or make the Monday after a federal holiday!” wrote another.
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According to CNN, there is a reason why the Super Bowl lands on a Sunday.
The Sports Broadcasting Act, passed in 1961, set the NFL’s broadcasting days to Sundays to protect college and high school football games, which typically are played on Friday and Saturday.
While it remains to be seen if the NFL will move ahead with what would be one of the biggest changes to the Super Bowl in decades, Ruggeri — a fan of the Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Rams — loves how people have responded to his petition so far.
“Oh my gosh,” he told WHAM. “It’s like if the Rams won the Super Bowl pretty much.”
Super Bowl LIV will see the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs face off in Miami on Feb. 2 on CBS.
