While a lot of people will be tuned into the Super Bowl on Sunday, there’s another competition going on that day and it’s way cuter.
Puppy Bowl XXI is set to air on Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, TBS, truTV, Max and discovery+ starting at 2 p.m. ET, and referee Dan Schachner tells ABC Audio this year they’re showcasing more animals than ever before.
“This year we’ve got 142 dogs. It’s the most amount ever. And we’ve got a huge amount of cats in the kitty halftime show,” he shares. “We’ve got 80 different shelters being represented. And we have got … 11 special needs dogs represented.”
In fact, Dan says one of the biggest challenges they face each year is trying to top themselves from the year before.
“Our goal, of course, is to get them all adopted, so that kind of … puts pressure on us to increase our roster sizes,” he says. “We don’t want dogs languishing in shelters. So that forces us in a way to squeeze in as many dogs and cats as we can.”
This year there’s also Puppy Bowl XXI Kickoff, airing at 1 p.m. ET, which gives fans a look at what it takes to earn a spot in the Puppy Bowl.
“That’s not extremely complicated,” Schachner says. “We just want to make sure you can run and be cute and adorable and not get too distracted.”
Schachner feels a great deal of pride at what Puppy Bowl can do, even long after the show airs.
“Thousands of dogs have been adopted as a result of Puppy Bowl, but that’s just a drop in the bucket,” he says. “What is bigger is the exponential growth that these rescues that we work with have reported back to us after the fact.”
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