Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Feb 3, 2017

Super Bowl 51, annoying hype and all:

For what it's worth, every year for the past 12 years, EA Sports runs their Madden football video game to simulate the Super Bowl contest. This year, CBS Sports ran the Super Bowl on the Madden NFL 17 video game and the Patriots won, 30-20.

People eat more food on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day of the year --except for Thanksgiving. Of course, the only difference is on Thanksgiving, there's usually a better game on. Some other food facts --and urban legends:
More than one in eight Americans order takeout or delivery food for the Super Bowl, according to the National Restaurant Association. While the majority order pizza, about half also order chicken wings and 20 percent get sandwiches. In addition, football fans will consume more than 11 million pounds of potato chips on Super Bowl Sunday, which is second only to Thanksgiving as the day on which Americans consume the most food.
According to the American Institute of Food Distribution, we football fans eat 42 million pounds of snack foods and other junk food on Super Bowl Sunday. The breakdown:
--11 million pounds of potato chips,
--12.2 million pounds of avocados (see controversy below)
--8.2 million pounds of tortilla chips,
--4.3 million pounds of pretzels,
--3.8 million pounds of popcorn,
--2.5 million pounds of mixed nuts
--one 12-pound cheese wheel (kidding). Basically, it's more than double our average daily snack food consumption. We'll spend over $50 million buy all this stuff, too. Pass the checkbook and the Maalox.

Top 5 pizza sales days are:

5. New Year's Day
4. The night before Thanksgiving
3. Halloween
2. New Year's Eve
1. Super Bowl Sunday
--On Super Bowl Sunday, pizza delivery drivers can expect $2 tips to sometimes soar as high as $20
--Domino's Pizza sells more pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day of the year: more than 1.2 million pies. Some other chains sell over 40 percent more pizzas than they do on a normal Sunday.
--Domino's delivery drivers will log about four million miles on Super Bowl Sunday
--Delivery sales of pizza spike the most during close Super Bowl games (Source: Pizza.com)

Super Bowl Myth & Rumor Control:

You've heard of some of these. Snopes.com tackles them with more detailed information but here are the short answers:

Claim: Sewage systems of major cities have broken due to the tremendous number of toilets being flushed simultaneously at halftime.
Status: False. Rumors of the havoc wreaked by widespread simultaneous toilet flushing after popular broadcast events (such as the final episode of TV's "M*A*S*H" in 1983) have been spread for decades, dating as far back as the 1930s "Amos 'n' Andy" radio program.

Claim: More women are the victims of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year.
Status: False. Time magazine says in 1993 women's advocacy groups, citing various reports about increased domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday, prompted NBC to air a public-service announcement during its game coverage. But the Washington Post investigated --and debunked the claims.
PS: For more detailed answers, go: snopes.com/sports/football/Superbowl.asp