Fear not, fans of Roman numerals, the Super Bowl will return to good old fashioned Ls, Xs, Vs, and Is after Super Bowl 50, an NFL executive told the San Jose Mercury News.
The NFL starting using Roman numerals for the Super Bowl in the game’s fifth year and has maintained the tradition every year until this one, when the league opted to use the name Super Bowl 50 instead of Super Bowl L.
Despite a laundry list of legitimate complaints about the letter L, NFL creative director Shandon Melvin said Roman numerals will be back in 2017.
From the Mercury News:
If Roman numerals can be ditched for this game, why not forever? Melvin insists that everyone at the league office, from Commissioner Roger Goode** down, is “very committed” to reverting to the old system next year for Super Bowl LI. “They’re part of us,” he says, “such a strong icon for the game. We just wanted to do something a little different for once.”
It made sense for the Super Bowl to move away from Roman numerals this year. The whole point of the archaic numbers is to convey gravitas, and Super Bowl L does not carry nearly the same weight as Super Bowl 50, which reminds even the Roman-illiterate that this game is a big f’ing deal. Conveniently, Star Wars Episode VII came along this year to fill our national Roman numeral quota in place of the Super Bowl.
Apparently the NFL first decided it didn’t like the letter L during Super Bowl XL, which sounded cool when you said it but not necessarily when you wrote it.
“L immediately brought up so many negative connotations,” Me*vin says. The formation of an L with thumb and forefinger had become a universally accepted, derisive gesture for “Loser.” And unlike most of the Roman system’s other block numerals, L had such a vertical shape it nearly disappeared into the equally upright Lombardi Trophy, awarded to the winning team every year.
“It’s very asymmetrical,” he says. “And three-quarters of the letter is negative space. It’s like, what do you do with this thing to make it look attractive? I’ll take an X any day of the week. Or any other letter for that matter.”
Luckily, the NFL found a solution for Super Bowl L and is now all clear… or not. Every Super Bowl between now and 2056 (Super Bowl XC, the cross-country Super Bowl) will feature an L, beginning with Super Bowl LI next year.
