This year's will be Super Bowl LIX, but why not Super Bowl 59?
The answer appears to be two-fold: to make them classier and less confusing. It was actually Kansas City Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt who suggested that Super Bowls use Roman numerals. He floated the idea to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1970. Prior to that, the first four events used numbers.
It’s not likely Hunt was thinking of avoiding confusion. Instead, Hunt believed the style lent the Super Bowl a kind of gravitas and signaled it was a major event. “This would further establish the tie to the past and also, in my opinion, add a bit of ‘class’ to our ‘unclassy’ name,” he wrote to Rozelle.
So, what about the confusion side of things? Well, it's to do with timing, as the Super Bowl is traditionally held in the year following the beginning of the regular season schedule. The winner of the Chiefs/Eagles game will technically be the 2024 Super Bowl champions. If the league opted to follow the lead of the NBA or MLB and label their championship with the year, then it would become difficult to follow. If this were Super Bowl 2025, shouldn’t it really be Super Bowl 2024? And if it were, why it is it being contested in 2025? It’s a semantics issue, but one that would quickly create confusion.
Beginning with Super Bowl V, letters became the norm and the previous events were renamed to follow the format.
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