Should the Monday after the Super Bowl be a holiday?

CINCINNATI (WKRC) - Super Bowl Sunday is one of the biggest party days of the year.

That’s not breaking news. It’s just a fact. And unsurprisingly, many of those watching the big game celebrate by overindulging with food and drink. Federal government statistics project that approximately $55 million is spent annually on parties for the NFL title game.

So why isn’t the day after a holiday?

It’s certainly been talked about before. Upwards of 17 million people call out sick on the Monday after Super Bowl. Business owners, students and other petitioners have tried unsuccessfully on Change.org to get the day off.

When you consider not only the lost productivity but factor in people staying out later for after-parties instead of grudgingly going home because of work in the morning, it might just make sense.

Count Kraft Heinz as one company which noticed the drop in productivity the day after the game. So the company announced last year that it was giving all of its employees Monday off.

"Statistics show over 16 million people call in sick or don't go to work and for those that do, productivity plummets so far that the country loses on average around $1 billion," Kraft Heinz said in a statement.

Consider these points cited in a 2015 report in International Business Times:

Rather than focus on work, employees are often discussing the game from the night before or are less motivated to work because they had too much to drink. As a result, even many of the people who show to work aren’t nearly as productive as usual. This can often be worse than employees who don't make it to work, says John Challenger, CEO of the employment consulting firm Challenger, Grey and Christmas.

“People are excited about the game,” Challenger told International Business Times. “They’ve been betting on their squares, coming in to talk about what happened, going online and looking at the videos ... It’s really a slowdown of work, particularly in the morning. This slacking off costs companies about twice as much as the absenteeism.”

According to a 2017article on bloomberg.com:

The data crunchers at Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. estimated that employers waste $290 million in wages for every 10 minutes their workers spend discussing the game, watching highlights or settling up their Super Bowl pools. If all of the nation's estimated 67 million employed people who will watch the Super Bowl nurse their hangovers by showing up an hour late or standing around chatting, that works out to a whopping $1.7 billion in lost productivity.

So, what's the holdup? As evidenced on phillyvoice.com, it's all about the money. And for those inquiring about moving the game to Saturday, that was analyzed here.