The Super Bowl has been held on Sunday for over half a century, but 16-year-old Frankie Ruggeri from Avon, New York, thinks it’s time for that to change. And he’s looking for help to make it happen.
Ruggeri started playing on his school football team in the seventh grade, according to WHAM-13. He may be an avid football fan. But he says he still wants to prioritize his education.
Ruggeri says students have to get up and go to school after staying up late watching the Super Bowl, WAOW reports. But, he argues, the problem would be fixed if the Super Bowl was moved to Saturday.
The high school student had the idea to move the game at a family dinner while casually chatting about the playoffs, reports CNN.
After dinner, he started a petition to broadcast the next Super Bowl — Super Bowl 55 — on a Saturday. As of right now, the petition has over 20,000 signatures, but, Ruggeri told WHAM, he’s hoping it earns millions of signatures.
Ruggeri isn’t the first one to push for the Super Bowl to be held a day earlier. Forbes argued it would make watch parties grander and increase workplace productivity the following Monday. The Atlanta Journal Constitution suggested it would be a lot more convenient for most viewers, giving them a day to recover from the late night. It would mean one less day of waiting for the highly anticipated game, too.
But NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told CBS the Super Bowl would never be on a Saturday, explaining that audiences were significantly larger on Sunday nights.
“That (idea) has been around for a long time, people have talked about that,” Goodell told CBS in 2018. “The reason we haven’t done it in the past is simply just from an audience standpoint. The audiences on Sunday night are so much larger. Fans want to have the best opportunity to be able to see the game and we want to give that to them, so Sunday night is a better night.”