Come Sunday, many of us will gather around the television set to watch the Super Bowl. Some of us love this event because of the snacks involved (mmm, chicken wings!), some people want to see the latest commercials and some of us are suckers for the half-time show. Then there are those who will actually watch and care about the game. But don’t make assumptions about who falls into which category based on gender! According to several articles bouncing around the Web, the old stereotype that women can’t tell their quarterback from their running back has been dead for awhile.

The New York Times has some statistics that might surprise you: Among women aged 18 to 49, “Sunday Night Football” is the third most-watched program in the United States (following “Dancing with the Stars” and “Grey’s Anatomy”). And when it comes to games on all channels, 34 percent of the NFL’s viewers are women.

Now, maybe you think these ladies just watch because there’s nothing else on, or because their boyfriends are watching. I’m going to have to call a foul on that, as one study, published in “Clinical Cardiology” reveals that women get just as wrapped up in the game as men. See, when your team loses, you get upset and stressed, which can lead to a heart attack. According to the study, men rooting for the losing team demonstrated a 15 percent increase in cardiac deaths compared to the baseline, but the real surprise was the increased rate of cardiac death in women — a whopping 27 percent rise. In other words, women have just as much at stake with a beloved team as men.

One researcher hedged his bets and said the only reason that women experienced such an increase in cardiac death was because they were upset for their guys. As one final effort to disabuse that notion, I’d like to point you toward another study published on Huffington Post yesterday. According to Zoosk, 73 percent of single women would rather watch the Super Bowl than have sex. The men, on the other hand, were evenly split on whether they’d watch the game or have sex. Now, perhaps these results say more about the men these single ladies are meeting than their love of the game, but I’m going to hope for everyone’s sake that that’s not the case. See you Sunday.

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