Super Bowl XVI Super Bowl XVI Super Bowl XVI was an American football game between the National Football Conference (NFC) champion San Francisco 49ers and the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Cincinnati Bengals to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 1981 season. The 49ers defeated the Bengals by the score of 26–21 to win their first Super Bowl. The game was played on January 24, 1982, at the Pontiac Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. It marked the first time that a Super Bowl was held at a cold-weather city. The domed stadium saved the crowd at the
Super Bowl XLIV A kickoff show for the game aired from 6pm EST to 6:28pm EST. With an average U.S. audience of 106.5 million viewers, this was the third most-watched Super Bowl, trailing only the 111 million viewers for Super Bowl XLV the following year and 111.3 million viewers for Super Bowl XLVI. At the time, it was the most-watched program of any kind in American television history, beating the 27-year-long record previously held by the final episode of "M*A*S*H", "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen", which coincidentally, also aired on CBS, and was watched by 105.97 million viewers. An estimated 153.4 million total viewers