"There is a potential for huge mood swings in the Super Bowl because of the magnitude of the event," said Hirt, who studies the personal costs and benefits of being a sports fan. "The effect on self-esteem from the game really depends upon the expectations of the fans going in. For some fans, just having their team get to the Super Bowl is enough, but for others a loss can be depressing. In the case of a lopsided defeat, like the 55-10 win of San Francisco over Denver in 1990, the effects can be devastating. To these fans, the loss embarrasses the entire city and can undo the previous success of that season."

Hirt said an interesting link to this Super Bowl involves the fans in Cleveland. "Many fans of the Cleveland Browns, which are now the Baltimore Ravens, are going to have very mixed feelings. For many years the Browns were a leading contender for the NFL championship, but they never made it to the Super Bowl. Now they are there, representing another city," he said. "But is it these fans' team, and do they want the team to succeed, or do they hope for a bitter loss for owner Art Modell and his Ravens?"

"The Super Bowl is widely recognized as one of the most important venues for promoting new prime-time shows. It has enormous promotional benefits," said Eastman, who has 25 years of experience studying television programming, marketing and promotion.

She said the show immediately following the game always gets high ratings but frequently draws a much lower audience in subsequent weeks.

"It has always interested me that the networks put so much money and effort into a major promotion that has such a short-term benefit most of the time," she said. "But there are other benefits, such as the prestige the event confers on the network that carries the Super Bowl. Think of what having it did for Fox. And there are valuable benefits in retaining and keeping affiliated stations happy, in appealing to new as well as prestigious advertisers, and in the ability to package advertising time buys that include this mega-sporting event."

She said evidence of promotion's importance to the networks is the fact that the big four (CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox) annually forgo more than $4 billion in advertising revenue to air promotions for their shows. She also noted that three-quarters of new programs fail.

"Many of the players in the Super Bowl are likely to experience high anxiety during the game, but this does not necessarily harm their performance," said Raglin, an associate professor of kinesiology. He said many sport psychologists have thought that elevated anxiety in athletes harms performance and have stressed relaxation techniques to lower anxiety. "However, research indicates that the influence of anxiety is highly individualized. Many athletes perform their best when anxiety is at a high intensity," he said.

He added that the best coaches seem to know instinctively how players respond to anxiety and can adjust their motivation accordingly. For example, he said, the late coaching great Vince Lombardi would treat his athletes differently, yelling at some while leaving others alone.

"It's really hard to predict something like that, but I have to think it wouldn't be much different from other NFL contests," said Brechue, who has nearly 20 years of experience in muscle physiology and strength training. He said the players will be excited and focused because it is the Super Bowl, but they also will have had two weeks to prepare for the game.

He added that with players getting bigger and stronger, a fatal injury in sports like professional football and hockey is only a matter of time. "I'm sorry to say that the death of an athlete in these sports from a vicious hit is inevitable sometime in this century. It would already have happened if it weren't for such sophisticated and protective equipment," he said. NFL equipment contains many safety advances to reduce and prevent injury, he explained, but there is only so much that can be done when 350-pound linemen tackle players with their full force.

"Ambush marketing occurs when someone who is not an official sponsor of the Super Bowl or the NFL tries to trade off the value of the event by suggesting a connection to it without having to pay for a sponsorship," Bowers said.

NFL sponsors obtain several privileges, which ambush marketers try to obtain as well. "Sponsors get inside the NFL compound, can have a tent set up, and run advertisements with the NFL and Super Bowl logos on them. When businesses are not official sponsors, there are several things they try to do to gain that recognition," he said.

For example, many companies will put up billboards on the walls of buildings near the stadium. Fans see those signs and assume they are affiliated with the event, or at least fans in large numbers see the signs while attending the event.

Event promoters and sponsors usually get agreements with the host city which require the city to secure an area around the Super Bowl venue to limit unofficial sponsors from advertising. "The host city will actually police the businesses in the area to prevent businesses from placing signs saying, 'Welcome NFL fans,'" he said.

Another way to ambush NFL sponsors is to advertise during the television broadcast of an event. "A lot of events have broadcast contracts that coordinate the official event sponsors with the businesses that buy broadcast time. But even those contracts aren't foolproof," Bowers said. "Suppose, for example, that CBS tells an advertiser it won't sell air time to the advertiser because CBS thinks it will conflict with an event sponsor. Banned advertisers can go to the local CBS affiliates in major-market cities and buy air time there."