The largest annual sporting event in the United States is set to kick off on Sunday, February 2, 2014, but advertisers around the country won’t be offering any Super Bowl specials before the game, which crowns the champion of the American football league.

That’s because the National Football League (NFL) has a history of aggressively pursuing any commercial use of the term Super Bowl, similar to the way the Organizing Committees for the Olympic Games protect the Olympics marks. The NFL’s aggressive protection of the Super Bowl mark leads to stores, bars and restaurants using euphemisms such as “big game specials,” “super deals” or simply references to "the game" in their late-January advertising.

It’s unclear whether the NFL can actually enforce the use its trademark in commercial advertising, but it certainly can discourage advertisers from doing so with the threat of expensive lawsuits, says Kevin Goldberg, a lawyer at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth in Washington. 

Writing on the firm’s CommLawBlog before the big game in 2012, Goldberg says that the National Football League takes its trademarks very seriously. “As the NFL  sees it, [rights to the term Super Bowl] extends not only to the game itself, but also to a mind-numbing range of stuff from clothing to jewelry to party invitations/napkins/decorations/posters to sporting goods to a concert series to things like television broadcasting services.”

Goldberg says that while a close examination “indicates that the scope of the NFL’s trademark protection does not appear to include parties, restaurants, bars or contests ...  the league has never been shy about threatening legal action and certainly has the money to back it up.”

And as for “the Big Game”? The NFL tried to trademark that, too, in 2007, only to discover that the annual college football game between the University of California and Stanford University has been called the Big Game for decades.