First of all I’m a football fan.
With that as an absolute one might figure that my Saturdays include college football and Sundays the National Football League. My first job after college was with the Oakland Raiders, a position I found both challenging and rewarding. And, like a kid at a card show that featured his athletic heroes, I never got over the excitement of working with top professional athletes and those in the media who were as well known as a team’s starting quarterback.
My first year after leaving the Raiders for a position with the Golden State Warriors, I spent Sundays with friends picking the games on a big board that I had drawn up for our weekly get-togethers.
While the guys, a dozen or so each week, loved the football games, their wives or girlfriends were more commonly there to enjoy each other’s company and the food. After a full season of weekly parties for football it came time to enjoy a Super Bowl party when the Dallas Cowboys were meeting the Denver Broncos in Roman Numeral XII.
The regular season Sunday football parties always included picking every game on the schedule, a dozen or more, against the point spread. The week of the Super Bowl I was trying to figure out how to make the party work with only one game to pick.
Then, it occurred to me that if I had my friends pick different aspects of the game; first downs, touchdowns, interceptions and other things that would happen during the game, we could have constant action off the same contest.
Turned out to be more fun than simply picking multiple games.
Even the wives and girlfriends enjoyed the draft as much as my male buddies. That was the first Super Bowl party I hosted, but over the next 25 years Super Sunday at the Ranahan house brought participants as sure as Cliff Swallows flocked to San Juan Capistrano each spring. The party grew to more than 100 participants and the game was adopted by some for play in their own houses when they moved out of my area.
In 2012, because I was doing a show for ESPN that required me to travel each week, I stopped hosting the party. But people missed it, wanted to know the rules so they could start their own group to play the game. I produced a rule book for them and illustrated what categories of the game were included on the draft board.
As the draft board was filled in with each category of football action, that is first downs and others, there would be one participant on first down for one team and another player on first down for that team’s opponent. The game had each player receive a dollar from the player listed on the other end of a category as it happened. If someone had the New England Patriots first down rushing, they would receive a dollar from the person opposite them with first down rushing Seattle Seahawks.
At a recent family Christmas party, my niece said you should make the game available online so everyone could play.