Super Bowl L

So, the 2016 Super Bowl will do away with one tradition that, quite frankly, I, for one, am none too pleased about.

For that year (and that year only, apparently), it will do away with the traditional Roman numerals. Since it just happens to be the 50th anniversary of the big game that year, it would have been one simple letter - L.

Super Bowl L.

Instead, the official logo reads Super Bowl 50.

And so far, all of the opinions that I have heard have been favorable, as people do not like having to figure out the old Roman numerals, and what they mean, which seems incredibly intellectually lazy to me.

The Roman numerals makes the Super Bowl feel somehow bigger, and more soaked in tradition in many ways, for a sport that, in North America (let alone the world), it is actually the youngest among all of the major sports in terms of having finalized the championship round. Everyone knows the "Super Bowl", and it probably now resonates more than "The World Series", or The Stanley Cup", or even the very imaginatively named "NBA Finals".  Each of them are older than the Super Bowl, and two of them, the World Series and the Stanley Cup, are very significantly so.

Yet, the Roman numerals seemed to feel like they evened that out, at least somewhat. It was just cool, made the Super Bowl a little different, and lent it a more dramatic feel.

They are saying that this is being done only for this one year. But I suspect that this is the first step, that they are merely testing the waters, and that before long, every Super Bowl will have our regular, Arabic numbers.

Could be wrong, and it's just a hunch.

But given all of the favorable responses so far, with people (like some local news anchors) talking about how annoying it is trying to figure out what the Roman numerals mean, in such a way that it reminds me of Alec Baldwin's character in The Edge, when he is talking about the "anguish" of figuring out the time on the opposite coast by adding or subtracting three hours to the time his watch is indicating, my gut feeling tells me that the NFL will do away with this particular tradition, and it saddens me a little bit, since it was one of the more pleasant traditions that seemed to lend the big game a little more grandeur when it takes center stage on one Sunday in the dead of winter.