Super bull!

Super Bowl legends are forged on the first Sunday in February.

Super Bowl lies? Well, they’re breathlessly told in the days leading up to the main event — a fishy blitz of football fibs and big-bucks blarney that gets recited and rehashed like corny campfire fables. 

You’ve heard them. You’ve believed them. Heck, you’ve probably even repeated them.

“Just think, a billion people are watching this game!”

“Did you know that Disney World totally empties out after the kickoff?”

“The avocado industry is built on the Super Bowl. More guac, anyone?”

Corporate hype and actual consumer appetites form the bedrock of this bunk. During Super Bowl week, news outlets and Internet sites blithely spin those tall tales into epic whoppers.

Sure, some folklore about Super Bowl gorging, guzzling and hangovers is based in reality. And over time, those painful truths are simply embellished in the rampant retelling.

But most of these alleged “big game facts” are built on numbers even flimsier than Rex Grossman’s quarterback rating. And in the end, they’re nothing more than Super Bull.

Here are 10 of the most famous Super Bowl myths, including even a few that turned out to be true.

Myth No. 1: Super Bowl Stock Indicator
If an old AFL team wins the game, the stock market will decline during that calendar year. If an original NFL team wins, the Dow Jones industrial average will rise.

Fact or fiction? Silly as it sounds, this potentially golden chestnut once seemed like a sure thing, proving correct 90 percent of the time during the first 31 Super Bowls.

But the Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots — two of the 10 American Football League franchises during the 1960s — helped spike that notion in recent years. The Dow gained ground after New England beat Carolina in 2004. Following Denver’s Super Bowl victories in 1998 and 1999, the stock market posted two of its best years.

Richard Drew / AP Will the Wall Street bulls be rooting for the Bears this year?

In fact, the “indicator” slumped so badly the past 10 years, its cumulative accuracy has now dropped to 80 percent. Still, the myth retains at least one high-placed believer.

“You can’t turn your back on any indicator that has an 80 percent success rate. It out-performs any nest of Nobel winners,” said Robert Stovall, a strategist for Wood Asset Management and “custodian” of the Super Bowl Indicator since 1979. He began tracking the odd connection after reading a blurb in the New York Times. “It’s just entertainment, but it works.”

With a smirk, Stovall admits it’s all a simple matter of NFL composition and stock market history: More teams are tied to the original NFL than the AFL, and the Dow rises in more years than it falls.

This year’s Super Bowl pits two original NFL teams, the Bears and Colts (formerly of Baltimore). That, Stovall, says, should not merely trigger bullish thoughts in 2007.

“That,” he said, “is a double buy!”

Answer: Fiction

Myth No. 2: Super Bowl hosts make super money
Does the Super Bowl’s host city really roll in the dough? Bigwigs talk big about the revenue bump their cities enjoy by staging the Super Bowl.

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Fact of fiction? From politicians to chamber of commerce leaders, the boilerplate promises often include projections of hundreds of millions of dollars in hotel, restaurant and rental car spending along with retail and sales tax hikes.

The South Florida Super Bowl XLI Host Committee – a private, not-for-profit group serving as the liaison between the NFL and local planning efforts – said the event “is expected to generate over $350 million in total economic impact for the region.” Meanwhile, the NFL says various studies and commissioned by local host committees and performed by local universities or research firms have found the Super Bowl’s economic impact is “usually in the $250-350 million range.”

The actual number?

“On the high side, there’s a $30 million impact. On the low side, it’s closer to zero,” said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and author of “The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business.”

The exaggeration, Zimbalist said, is created by flawed reasoning in the studies — mainly the revenue estimates assume no tourists would be flocking to these warm-weather host cities if not for the Super Bowl. After Miami last hosted the game in 1999, a study by the national firm PFK Consulting found the city’s hotel occupancy rate that January was only 3.25 percent higher than the combined January average of 1998 and 2000 when the Super Bowl was played elsewhere.

“Let’s say a city otherwise loaded with tourism in early February is hosting the Super Bowl. People coming down will replace golfers or water skiers or whatever the case might be. So there’s no noticeable net increase in tourism,” Zimbalist said. “There wouldn’t be any impact on revenue.”

Answer: Fiction

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