Superb Owl — Snowy owl appearing to laugh with closed eyes and open beak in the snow

Superb Owl

2008catchphraseclassic

Published September 29, 2026

Superb Owl is an anagram-based joke where people flood social media with owl photos and content during the Super Bowl to derail football chatter. What began as a stray typo grew into an annual tradition, with birders, zoos and even Stephen Colbert using the phrase to sidestep the NFL's aggressive trademark enforcement.

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Overview

Superb Owl is a one-letter shuffle of Super Bowl that turns the NFL's championship game into a bird. Every year on Super Bowl Sunday, users post owl photos, GIFs and puns tagged #SuperbOwl, capitalizing the O to distinguish the joke from an honest misspelling1. The gag works on two levels: it hijacks Super Bowl search traffic with wildlife content, and it lets brands sidestep the NFL's famously aggressive trademark policing2.

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The format is loose. There is no set image macro, just a shared convention that owl content posted during the game counts as a Superb Owl post. Nature accounts and zoos lean on real owl photography, while sports bars and small businesses use the phrase in ads to avoid takedown notices from the league2. Wiktionary even documents the term as a workaround for the NFL's litigiousness3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (typo joke) / Reddit (community formation)
Date
2008

The earliest documented online use came from Twitter user @shawnw, who tweeted "Superb Owl party tonight!" on February 3rd, 20084. The joke was almost certainly older offline as a common typo, but @shawnw's post is the earliest indexed instance tied to game day.

The community around the joke formed three years later. On February 6th, 2011, Redditor bennybuckethead created /r/superbowl with two rules: image posts must contain an owl, and text posts must be about owls4. Unlike the annual Twitter surge, the subreddit stays active year-round.

How It Spread

Superb Owl picked up mainstream traction when Stephen Colbert used it in 2014 on The Colbert Report, framing it as a legal loophole to discuss the NFL championship without triggering the league's trademark enforcement4. Two years later, on February 19th, 2016, Wiktionary added an entry defining superb owl as "the Super Bowl, in a non-trademark-infringing manner, due to the extreme litigiousness of the National Football League"3.

The hashtag hit a bigger tipping point in 2019. On February 2nd, National Geographic tweeted a GIF of an owl with the caption "Soon. #SuperbOwlSunday," pulling thousands of retweets and likes over the following days1. The next day, USA Today ran a piece on the trend, noting Google had added an owl Easter egg to searches for Super Bowl in the run-up to the Patriots-Rams game2. The New York Times covered it the day before that under the headline "Want to Read About the Superb Owl? Click Here"4.

Mainstream culture kept absorbing the joke. Jeopardy! ran "The Superb Owl" as a category on its January 31st, 2019 episode, with contestants including attorney J.B. Evans and Montessori teacher Joan Dietrich answering owl-themed clues5. On /r/superbowl, the top post as of February 2019 was TheBigBadBurritos' 2018 submission asking users to upvote a photo so it would appear in Google image results for "SuperbOwl quarterback," collecting more than 59,000 points4.

Timeline

2008-02-03

Twitter user @shawnw posts "Superb Owl party tonight!", the earliest known online use tied to game day.

2011-02-06

Redditor bennybuckethead launches /r/superbowl with owls-only posting rules.

2014-02

Stephen Colbert uses "Superb Owl XLVIII" on The Colbert Report to dodge NFL trademark restrictions.

2016-02-19

Wiktionary adds a superb owl entry defining it as a non-trademark-infringing way to reference the Super Bowl.

2018-02-04

TheBigBadBurritos posts the "SuperbOwl quarterback" thread that becomes the top /r/superbowl post.

2019-01-31

Jeopardy! airs an episode featuring "The Superb Owl" category.

2019-02-02

National Geographic tweets an owl GIF with #SuperbOwlSunday, drawing thousands of retweets.

2019-02-03

USA Today, The New York Times and Time all publish stories on the Superb Owl hashtag.

Frequently Asked Questions