How many times have we all said that the Monday after the Super Bowl should be a holiday?
I mean, everybody’s drinking and housing chicken wings for hours on a Sunday night until the game finally ends at, what, 10 or 11pm, depending on where you live? And then we have to get up for work the next day, hungover and, depending on which team you root for, either depressed or still jacked up from the game the night before.
Nobody wants to work on the Monday after the Super Bowl. So why isn’t it a holiday?
Well if you live in Tennessee, that might soon become a reality.
A bill introduced by Tennessee state Senator London Lamar and Representative Joe Towns Jr., both of whom are Democrats from Memphis, would designate the Monday after the big game as an official state holiday. Initially the bill proposed replacing Columbus Day with Super Bowl Monday as a state holiday, but it’s since been amended to leave Columbus Day alone and add an additional holiday on the Monday following the NFL’s biggest game.
In a statement, Towns explained his reasoning behind introducing the bill:
“With more than 16 million Americans expected to skip work the day after the Super Bowl and about 8 million expected to ask for the day off in advance, we’re talking about a major hit to the workforce.
My bill simply wants to examine giving the rest of us the day off. Let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more American than the Super Bowl and it’s becoming more and more the norm to miss work the next day. So maybe we should just codify it…or at least just talk about it.”
It’s obviously not a new discussion, as people have been suggesting that the Monday following the Super Bowl should be a holiday for years – but with no success so far.
In 2019, a petition asking the government to make the day a national holiday managed to garner only around 15,000 signatures.
But a study predicted that last year’s Super Bowl could cost employers over $6.5 billion in lost productivity, when accounting for both the estimated 6.1 million people who don’t work the day after the game and “distracted work” from the other NFL fans who do manage to make it to the office on Monday.
So why not just give everybody the day off to reset and recover?
Well for those of us in Tennessee, that just might happen.
