Fifty years ago, when it was still a modest spectacle watched on a single medium, played by a single gender, contested exclusively between teams from the US, and largely ignored by most of planet Earth, Super Bowl 50 was nevertheless called a “world championship” by the National Football League, whose very name betrayed a parochial, one-nation interest in what the rest of the world knew—if they knew it at all—as “American football.”
That was 2016, when the NFL was a quaint pastime played for relatively low stakes and officiated by human beings who flipped a coin to start every game, used a physical length of chain to measure a first down, blew a whistle to halt play, and threw a yellow handkerchief to signal a penalty. So primitive was the technology of that benighted age—typing with opposable thumbs was our principal form of communication—that NFL players literally practiced against stuffed dummies.
As Super Bowl 100 played out in all its enormity last night, Super Bowl 50 looked tiny by comparison, the way the Earth now looks to our colonists in space. And yet it’s instructive to look back on that long-ago spectacle in the San Francisco Bay Area to see just how far the game has come, and society with it.
In many ways, that world was an inversion of our modern planet. In 2016, people drove cars; in 2066, cars drive people. What we now call reality, they called virtual reality. In ’16, earthbound people aspired to see the wonders of Mars; last night, Mars-bound people longed for the wonders back on Earth, as the pioneering first generation of NASA and SpaceX colonists lamented the 14-minute broadcast delay of Super Bowl 100, played 140 million miles away in a desert landscape stranger than any on the Red Planet.
For its centennial Super Bowl, the NFL returned to its favorite host city, Las Vegas, which first staged the title game 45 years ago. Super Bowl LV shared its initials with Las Vegas but also with Louis Vuitton, the luxury brand that paid handsomely to cover game balls in its handbag leather, embossed with its famous logo. And though that game is now ancient history, 2021 remains important as the year the NFL—following the lead of the rest of the country—abandoned its nominal objections to sports gambling and awarded Steve Wynn the expansion franchise that became the Las Vegas Centurions.
It was a pleasing coincidence that Super Bowl 100 would celebrate the century mark with the Centurions playing in their home stadium, the Macau Palace, which famously pops up like a Toaster Strudel from beneath Las Vegas Boulevard and retracts between games, reverting to its role as a public plaza.
The Centurions’ opponent last night, of course, was Barcelona, the American football subsidiary of the Spanish fútbol giants, who brought to the NFL a ready-made legion of loyal supporters. Those fans arrived from all points of the globe, touching down both at McCarran International and Tarkanian Supersonic. Fifty years ago, before Super Bowl 50 was played, experts predicted that human beings would still attend live events in the year 2066, even though they could be in the game from the comfort of their couches. “There’s still going to be something special about literally being there,” Jared Smith, the president of Ticketmaster North America, said in 2015.
Scalpers offered contact lenses guaranteed to fool any ocular-based biometric ticketing technology.
He was right, of course, which explains all those people arriving at the stadium in all the usual ways. Some came by autonomous cars that dropped them off a mile or more from the stadium, their fitness wearables synced to their car software, both programmed to make their owner walk whenever the day’s calories consumed exceeded the day’s calories burned. Others turned up on the transcontinental Hyperloop, gliding at 760 miles per hour on a cushion of air through a low-pressure pipeline, as if each passenger was an enormous bank slip tucked into a pneumatic tube at a drive-through teller window in 1967. That was the year the first Super Bowl was played, midway through the first season of Star Trek, set in a space-age future that now looks insufficiently imagined.
And so hours before Super Bowl 100 kicked off—we persist in using that phrase, long after the NFL abandoned the actual practice—the pregame scene offered all the Rockwellian tableaux of the timeless tailgate: children running pass patterns on their hoverboards—they still don’t quite hover, dammit—dads printing out the family’s pregame snacks, grandfathers relaxing in lawn chairs with their marijuana pipes.
At the first Super Bowl, ushers tore tickets. At Super Bowl 50, they scanned them. At Super Bowl 100, fans were retina-scanned on the way in, their eyes swiped with what looked like a neuralyzer from the cinematic classic Men in Black, except that these don’t erase your short-term memory. That’s the job of the $75 beers inside.
Nearby, an unshaven cohort of scalpers and touts offered the customary array of contact lenses guaranteed to fool any ocular-based biometric ticketing technology. To judge by their signs, every scalper offered “cheaper peepers” than the next guy, but these lenses were hardly inexpensive, given the global—and nominally interplanetary—interest in Super Bowl 100, which would be “experienced” in some way by 2 billion people, some of whom paid the $25,000-and-up face value to attend. (Still included: a complimentary seat cushion.)
Not every “ticket-holder” required a seat. This innovation was predicted by Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Technology Association, when he said 50 years ago, “In sporting events in the future, we’ll be able to upgrade and downgrade our seats throughout the game.” Standing-room fans of 2066 would be content, he noted, to watch the game in virtual reality once inside.
And so the VR headsets of 2016 gave way to the VR glasses of ’25, which led to VR contact lenses by the mid ’30s, which yielded to the implants of today, just as Ken Perlin predicted. Perlin, professor of computer science at New York University and the leader in multiperson immersive and mixed-reality environments, said before Super Bowl 50, “We don’t call it virtual reality—we call it future reality. Our language always evolves with technology. So in 1995, if someone was on a computer and you asked them what they were doing, they’d say ‘surfing the web.’ Now they say ‘reading.’ ” In this same way, communication devices for every player in 2066 have made the huddle unnecessary, turning what we once called the no-huddle offense into Super Bowl 100’s just plain “offense.”
And yes, it’s Super Bowl 100. There was a time when the game would have been branded as Super Bowl C. Fifty years ago, at Super Bowl 50, the league ditched Roman numerals for a year; it abandoned them for good at Super Bowl 88, when groundskeepers and graphic designers despaired of squeezing an unplayable Scrabble rack—LXXXVIII—onto each 25-yard line and onto T-shirts. And so Roman numerals went the way of the Roman empire, which survives now most conspicuously in the sandaled Centurion on the home team’s helmets.
For years, many predicted a Roman-style fall for the NFL, over concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But there were other dystopian possibilities for the league above and beyond extinction. Before Super Bowl 50, Travis Tygart, CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency, spoke of the possible future of performance enhancement. “We firmly believe that natural human competition—not having the best chemist—is what gives sport its inherent value,” he said. “But [to be competitive] in 50 years, it won’t require just the best chemists; you’ll have to have the best heart transplant surgery doctor who can give you the mechanical heart that will never fail, that will always be under control, even at exhaustion. You [will] end up literally having cyborgs—part human, part machine—competing.”
Mercifully, no man with a steel heart has yet participated in a Super Bowl, with the possible exception of Tom Landry. Still, the sheer volume of technology—hardware and software—on these magnificent players, at the fingertips of every coach, and built into every stadium and playing surface, was enough to make some wonder before Super Bowl 100 if the game would really be contested between men or supermen (and women).
As analytics became more sophisticated, game theory more prevalent, and strategy more mutually predictable, football threatened to resemble two supercomputers playing chess against each other: IBM’s Big Blue scarcely distinguishable from the Big Blue of the New York Giants.
But that clearly hasn’t happened. “If you described to someone in the 1880s that there would be this sport called auto racing—when they didn’t yet know what an automobile was—they’d say, ‘That’s not a sport, that’s just technology,’ ” Perlin noted way back in 2015. “And it will be the same with football. What makes it a sport—what makes it compelling human drama—is that there is a person with a human heart and a human brain, making decisions and performing brilliantly sometimes, and sometimes failing.”
To say that he was right is an understatement, of course, for we would see all of those things in Super Bowl 100.
The traditional flyover of military fighter planes in Las Vegas was preceded earlier in the week by Barcelona’s arrival via SST, which promises a maximum of nine hours from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world, at Mach 3. So Super Bowl 100 was also a celebration of the globe-shrinking technology that allowed the NFL to become a truly international football league, as the two national anthems attested.
After a holographic Jimi Hendrix performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” on electric guitar—an homage to the first Super Bowl, held in the winter preceding the Summer of Love—Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, who died in 1973, played “Els Segadors,” the anthem of Catalonia.
Game balls were dropped by drone into the still-sure hands of the honorary US captain (73-year-old former Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr.) and at the gilded feet of the international captain (78-year-old former Barcelona forward Lionel Messi), both men looking fit in middle age.
Possession had already been assigned to Las Vegas for having the better regular-season record (17–3), and the Centurions chose to start with the ball at their own 20. The opening kickoff was purely ceremonial—like a first pitch in baseball—a vestige of when there were real kickoffs and kick returns.
Elimination of the kickoff reduced high-speed collisions and head trauma.
Elimination of the kickoff had the salutary benefit of reducing high-speed collisions and thus head trauma. But it simply wasn’t possible to eradicate concussions in professional football. So large was the public’s appetite for the game—and the game was so lucrative to league owners—that the NFL had long since resolved to live with concussions and CTE while working to reduce them.
Engineers created new materials—wonder substances that hardened on impact, materials that mended themselves—which allowed the helmet to become part of the solution. When Centurions quarterback Kirk James was sacked on the third play of Super Bowl 100, doctors reviewed the readout on the EEG built into his helmet, and he remained in the game.
Over the years, the increasingly complicated concussion protocol created frequent stoppages and mandatory substitutions, necessitating 90-person rosters, with five-man rotations at quarterback, akin to baseball pitching staffs.
The rigorous scientific monitoring of the action ultimately allowed professional football to survive, and it changed the model of college athletics. The study of college players by university researchers allowed those athletes to be paid as research subjects, much in the same way that students are paid to participate in psychology experiments.
The biggest change in football over the past 50 years has been in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of head injuries. “We’ll have a completely different way to diagnose [them],” predicted Uzma Samadani, associate professor of neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota back in 2015, when she was a neurotrauma consultant to the NFL. “A concussion will be like a heart attack.” Which is to say, more preventable and urgently treated to limit damage.
Sure enough, Harvard researchers developed an antibody to treat CTE. Today there are blood tests to detect certain proteins for early diagnosis and, alongside those built-in EEGs, helmets include concussion sensors to measure movement of the brain inside the skull. And yet the only certain knowledge science has is that football remains brutal and will never be made fully safe. Removing the Roman numerals did not exempt the Super Bowl from its echoes of ancient Rome.
Barcelona brought its usual continental flair to the Super Bowl, running a variation of the Left Bank offense made popular in Paris in the 2030s, and it took a 7–0 lead on a leaping catch by All-Pro receiver Michael Davis, whose 60-inch vertical from a natural surface is among the best in the league and whose knees are among the highest-rated by J.D. Power and Associates.
Fifty years ago, Mounir Zok, senior sports technologist with the US Olympic Committee, expressed hope that DNA would someday “resolve once and for all the big debate around whether talent is innate or whether you can acquire it.” As it turns out, innate talent is baked into genes, whose variants affect the body’s ability to lay down collagen, which forms ligaments, allowing teams to predict which players are more susceptible to torn ACLs (if they have ACLs).
The Centurions quickly tied things up on a 32-yard touchdown dash by Hieronymus Carr, who was running on the type of prosthetic legs—what we now call man-machine interfaces—that have for years allowed amputees and the physically impaired to perform at the highest level in the NFL and other sports, all the while engendering the usual complaints about competitive advantages.
But every player has benefited from robotics and bionics. Fifty years ago, Jason Kerestes, a robotics engineer at Boeing Research & Technology, asked: “Would we be practicing against robots and would we be honing our skills as humans by playing against a superior mimic of a human?” The answer, we now know, is a resounding yes. In the lead-up to this game, the offensive line protecting Barcelona’s quarterbacks practiced, as it has all season, against intelligent automatons—machines that are infinitely more athletic and intelligent (and thus better practice partners) than tackling dummies and blocking sleds.
As time expired in the first half in Las Vegas, Centurions kicker Liberty Wright made a 56-yard field goal to give the home team a 10–7 lead. And while the presence of women in the NFL has long been recognized as a step forward, it also opened the league to cynical accusations that these new players had an unfair competitive advantage, as doping is more effective in female athletes. But even these accusations were human progress of a sort. Remember: NFL subterfuge used to involve taking the air out of footballs in bathroom stalls.
As the teams headed to their locker rooms, no one filed out to the nacho-printing stations. Everyone remained rooted to their spot for the halftime extravaganza, the crowd waiting for Elvis to enter the building.
Rock stars once looked to space for inspiration—the last century gave us “Rocket Man,” “Space Oddity,” “Intergalactic”—and took names that reflected our obsession with interstellar travel: Ziggy Stardust, Freddie Mercury, Bill Haley and the Comets. Fifty-two years ago, the Super Bowl halftime performer was a man named Peter Hernandez, who had taken the far-out stage name Bruno Mars. Now that the Red Planet has a live colony, those names are quaint relics of retrofuturism, those unrequited visions of the future that have long since faded into the past, the way the year 2000 was always depicted—in 1950—with flying cars and flights to Mars. The space age gave us the New York Jets, to say nothing of the Jetsons, but we’re still waiting on those personal jetpacks.
When the receiver landed and the ref-bot glowed green to signal touchdown, pulse rates spiked worldwide.
But as earthlings endeavored to become multiplanetary, principally through the initial NASA and SpaceX Martian voyages in the 2040s, they proved that some of these visions do come to pass. And so virtual reality gave way to augmented reality: holograms appearing among us in the real world, in our fields of vision, projected through eyeglasses. Thus, the Super Bowl 100 halftime show featured a chorus of holographic Vegas immortals in their prime (Elvis, Sinatra, Wayne Newton, Liberace), performing alongside today’s live Vegas icons (Britney Spears, North West, and Blue Ivy Carter, not to mention the former boy band turned Greatest Rock and Roll Band in History, One Direction, now in their 55th year of touring).
When the augmented reality of halftime ended and the heightened reality of the second half returned, fans at home and in the stadium had a God’s-eye view of the action on the NFL’s own network, which decades ago took its product straight to the cord-cutting consumer instead of parceling it out to broadcast networks. After Fox refused to pony up for ocular inserts in the contentious labor battles of 2045, the league sacrificed rights fees while raking in every poker chip of advertising revenue, segment sponsorship, and ancillary rights.
With motion-capture sensors on every player, spectators had sight lines into every movement on the field. Midway through the fourth quarter, Carr, the Centurions back, coughed up the ball on his own 2-yard line after a botched handoff from number-two quarterback Tim Brooks, who had called an audible that was inaudible through Carr’s communications device. Everyone watching could place themselves inside the ensuing scrum.
Human officials stood on the sidelines, also watching the game on implants, quickly spotting that Barcelona had gained possession. (They would score on the next play.) “Fifty years from now, I don’t know that we have human refs,” DuBravac had predicted in 2015. “If two eyes are good, imagine a robot with 60 different image sensors. It doesn’t have to turn its head, it just picks up images and makes a call.”
This precision, however, hasn’t eliminated second-guessing but increased it. Seeing every angle, including those that players are not privy to—hostage as they are to their own points of view—has given fans more information than the participants. Perlin predicted even before Super Bowl 50 that the future would be a golden age of second-guessing, making 2016 seem like a gentler, less coarse era of human discourse, when talk radio and cable sports hot-take shows were comparatively genteel.
Barcelona drove. Number-three quarterback Andy Petrovic was fixated on the golden glow of the first-down line, 10 yards in the distance. Decades ago, only television viewers could see this stripe, leaving the principals—receivers, linebackers, coaches—to pray for a favorable spot. Now, with three minutes left in the game, the Catalans earned first downs on three straight passes, their wideouts easily making the kind of receptions that were once called one-handed catches and are now known—thanks to the evolution of man and glove—as “catches.” That golden stripe kept moving down the field, 10 yards ahead of Barca, like an infantry retreating from oncoming tanks.
The Catalans had those tanks, too. None of their backs wore a bionic suit—the robotic exoskeleton originally developed to help the disabled walk. The suits were finally banned in the NFL after last season. Still, the Barca backs were powerful enough to run for a series of small gains, paying lip service to the notion that running the ball is still necessary to keep defenses honest, though the increasing size on both sides of scrimmage—tilting toward an average of four bills—has rendered the gaps ever narrower. This girth grew gradually, the way new layers of paint eventually seal a window shut, with the help of not just training and nutrition but also genetic manipulation based on Crispr technology developed back in the 2010s.
Barcelona gained confidence with every 5-yard snap. These snaps were once routinely taken under center, until passing became so prevalent that every play was from the so-called shotgun formation or its truncated cousin, the pistol. NFL offenses finally settled on something in between. Mercifully, given the nation’s still unresolved epidemic of gun violence, we now simply call it the snap.
The chain gang moved the down-and-distance markers, those cutesy reminders of the league’s humble, analog origins, when three men carrying a 10-yard length of chain was deemed sufficiently accurate. Of course, the chain gang is merely ornamental now, like the Patriots’ minutemen mascots, as every millimeter of the field is electronically mapped and the ball is spotted accordingly. But the chain gang marches on anyway, a beloved anachronism. In that regard, these officials are like the palace guards wearing bearskin hats in front of Buckingham Palace in London, where the NFL first became truly worldly.
For decades, the NFL spoke of being a global league but was about as international as the International House of Pancakes (or less so, as IHOP at least had outlets in Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East). But then came the London Beefeaters—changed to the Doubledeckers after vegans picketed—followed by Mexico City, Toronto, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Beijing, and on and on, the league bifurcating into two mega-conferences called the National Football Conference (comprising the US-based teams) and the International Football Conference (everyone else), guaranteeing an international Super Bowl, while also ensuring that one American team would always play in it.
In Super Bowl 100, that team was the Centurions, who took over on their own 20 after Barcelona’s long scoring drive, down 14–10, with scarcely more than a minute left. After four quick completions against a porous prevent defense—some things never change—Las Vegas stared down four seconds on the clock, 21 yards to history.
Through his MindTalk device, James, the Centurions quarterback, got the play call from the sideline. We’ve forgotten now, but these MindTalks were first used to combat ambient crowd noise in stadiums, by transmitting to a tiny receiver in the mouth guard, which vibrated to create a voice in the quarterback’s inner ear that told them the name of the play. Now, of course, every player wears such a mouth guard, and coaches send not just plays but also positive affirmations to each player throughout the game. James’ inner ear—channeling the voice of Centurions life coach Charlotte-Anne Moore on a headset in the press box—told him: “Relax. This is the fulfillment of your childhood dreams. You are about to throw the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl.”
You know the rest. Las Vegas’ star receiver, Antoine Broadhurst, leapt for James’ arcing pass in the corner of the end zone, the springiness of the artificial-turf subflooring, like a sprung floor for dancing, allowed him to bound 6 feet in the air but also softened his landing and protected his knees, at once increasing the safety and spectacle. He reached up with both hands—it’s the two-handed catch that now requires a modifier—and clapped his left palm over the ball in his right, as if slapping a rebound in basketball.
When Broadhurst landed and the ref-bot glowed green to signal touchdown, pulse rates spiked worldwide. Fans who opted to wear biosensors that measured their vital signs—blood oxygen levels and perfusion indices—set a new Super Bowl record for Visceral Reaction Measurement.
Years ago, there would have been a replay on a large in-stadium screen called a Jumbotron, a name that sounds camp and retrofuturistic to our modern ears. Now, of course, the play was replayed, from an infinity of angles, in our own fields of vision.
Barcelona challenged the call, unsuccessfully, claiming that the Centurions had stolen the biosigns of coach Jordi Bonaventura using software designed to interpret human emotions to read the mind of their defensive coordinator. “Technology in some regards actually enables people to cheat in new ways that are difficult for us to anticipate,” noted Maurice Schweitzer, professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School, way back in 2015.
The company that developed this software half a century ago, Affectiva, had 3.2 million faces in its database and could read countless human expressions. (Though decades ago the technology proved ineffective on Bill Belichick, who had only one expression, and possibly only one emotion.) It is also why every coach wears a poker face of simulated indifference on the sidelines, as Bud Grant did nearly 100 years ago.
Traditions are still important. And so, by ancient custom, the Centurions accepted the Vince Lombardi trophy from the commissioner, Chip Goodell, and then—this being Super Bowl 100—they were congratulated in person, on the field, by the 51st commander in chief, President Robert Gronkowski. A blimp, filled with helium and named for a tire manufacturer, still floated above the title-game festivities, for no other reason than: We like it like that. For all the benefits of our wearables and ingestibles, we still love our dirigibles. The football field still goes to 100, and now, so does the Super Bowl.
It would be foolish to imagine what Super Bowl 150 might look like—who could possibly forecast 50 years down the road?—though it is always in our nature to wonder. The future is a kind of eternal utopia, full of promises forever out of reach. In Las Vegas, as confetti cannons discharged into the desert night, James, the MVP, turned to the cameras and said, “I’m going to Disney World,” where there remains an attraction that fascinates every generation, and always will. It’s called Tomorrowland.
Steve Rushin (@SteveRushin) is a special contributor at Sports Illustrated.
