NEW YORK – It is frowned upon when National Football League (NFL) players complain to the referees. But at least they do not urinate on them.

The same cannot be said for the competitors in the Puppy Bowl, Animal Planet’s canine football game that takes place in October but did not air until the afternoon of Super Bowl on Feb 11.

The event’s referee, Mr Dan Schachner, stays ready for all eventualities by keeping five identical uniforms in his dressing room so he can change when accidents occur. The 49-year-old admits growing lax about handing out penalties for “premature watering of the lawn” since he began calling the game in 2011. “I don’t automatically reach for the flag,” he said. “We have a game to play.”

This year’s Puppy Bowl, which was televised at 2pm Eastern time on Feb 11 (3am, Feb 12, Singapore time), was the 20th edition of the event, a milestone for a programme that began as a tongue-in-cheek feed of puppy playtime before evolving into a counter-programming juggernaut.

The three-hour skirmish over a football-shaped chew toy has been on the air in the United States for longer than long-running series Grey’s Anatomy. Animal Planet said last year’s Puppy Bowl “reached” more than 13 million viewers.

In this year’s edition, Team Ruff upset reigning champions Team Fluff 72-69 to take home the Lombarky Trophy. Moosh, an australian shepherd mix who forced a key turnover, was awarded Most Valuable Player.

The event’s sustained success has come with unique production challenges. The players cannot throw because they lack opposable thumbs. They fall asleep at the 20-yard line, and sometimes they try to bathe in the water bowl. They are especially bad at determining when to go for a two-point conversion.

It takes more than 100 crew members and 200 poop bags to coax the puppies into some semblance of a football game. “The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade requires just as much coordination,” said Mr Howard Lee, the president of Discovery Networks, which owns Animal Planet.

In an interview, he described the programme as a call for pet adoption sneakily disguised as a football game. According to Animal Planet, all of the 1,298 dogs that have played in past Puppy Bowls have been adopted. The event results in a surge of interest in shelters whose puppies take the field, although those that play in the game have usually been adopted by the time it airs.

The 131 members of this year’s line-up were selected through an online casting call last summer, and came from more than 70 shelters and rescue centres across the US. All were between three and six months old.

In October, the draft picks were transported to a hockey arena in Glens Falls, New York, that had been outfitted with a 8.5m-long AstroTurf field. The game was filmed over the course of a week to allow the puppies to take ample hydration and nap breaks. The producers subsequently edited down any slow periods in game play.

To avoid injuries, smaller breeds such as dachshunds and pugs faced off in the first half, while the huskies and bloodhounds came on for a brawnier second half. (In Mr Schachner’s experience, smaller breeds are more likely to “elude defenders” and “break tackles”.) Puppies on two teams scored touchdowns by carrying chew toys into either end zone.

On-set trainer Victoria Schade benches dogs when they are looking overwhelmed. In her 18 years working on the Puppy Bowl, she has perfected her technique for getting the dogs to gaze up patriotically during the national anthem: dangling treats above their heads.

“Freeze-dried chicken, freeze-dried liver, freeze-dried cheese: That’s going to get your Puppy Bowl-worthy performance,” she said.

The first Puppy Bowl, which aired in 2005, was more like a pick-up game. Animal Planet’s producers had been asked by the network’s general manger to devise some kind of counter-programming for the Super Bowl, said Ms Margo Kent, who was then an executive producer for the network.

“We could not believe how well it did,” said Mr David Doyle, who was then vice-president for production and development at Animal Planet. The event became the “darling of ad sales and senior management,” he added. “All of a sudden, it became all about: How can we make money off this cool thing?”

By Puppy Bowl II, ads for Subaru lined the stadium.

Scorekeeping and uniforms were added in Puppy Bowl XI, and a sloth was introduced as assistant referee three years later. With each flashy addition, the Puppy Bowl also dedicated a larger share of airtime to encouraging viewers to adopt pets, including senior dogs and puppies with special needs.

If the event is good for puppy adoption, it may be even better for Warner Bros Discovery, one of the entertainment industry’s biggest, and newest, behemoths. Last year, Puppy Bowl viewership added more than 4 million additional viewers, according to the network, thanks in part to Discovery’s acquisition of WarnerMedia in 2022.

For the first time, Puppy Bowl XIX was broadcast simultaneously on Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, HBO Max, TBS and Discovery+. “The viewership has jumped especially because we’ve had more eyeballs from all these different platforms,” Mr Lee said.

Animal Planet said it would not share the cost to produce the Puppy Bowl or the advertising revenue it brings in. But the programme tends to have a high return on investment, said Mr Doyle, now an executive vice-president at Hearst Media Production Group. The first Puppy Bowl cost less than US$100,000 (S$134,000) to produce, he said. “I’m sure it costs five times what we spent on it or more,” he said. “But it’s probably bringing in 50 times the amount of money.”

Puppy Bowl crew members past and present offered various theories for the programme’s continued dominance: It appeals widely across age groups; it is easy to watch while making chilli con carne. Your preferred team can get eliminated during the NFL playoffs, but it cannot fall short of making the Puppy Bowl.

Then, almost all of them circled back to the obvious: People really like puppies.

Many viewers are motivated by the Puppy Bowl to seek out one of their own. Ms Erika Proctor, 42, the executive director of Green Dogs Unleashed, a special-needs animal-rescue centre in Troy, Virginia, estimated she gets close to 100 e-mails the day of the Puppy Bowl asking about adoptions and training. An uptick in applications follows, she said.

Those who are on set for the filming of the Puppy Bowl do not necessarily know its winner. Producers film endings in which each team triumphs, and the victor is determined in post-production.

Despite appearances, the producers insist that Puppy Bowl glory is earned on the field, not scripted by its human supervisors.

“You have to condense it down to make it a story that’s understandable and fun,” said Mr Joe Boyle, a senior vice-president for production and development at Discovery. “But we follow what really happened.” NYTIMES