BAD BUNNY … BUGS BUNNY … WHY CAN’T THE NFL MAKE PEOPLE LAUGH AT HALFTIME?
Any singer will prompt anger these days — people will get mad, even if it’s George Strait — so at this point, commissioner Roger Goodell and Jay-Z should seek a happier act than a raging anti-Trumper
I sobbed when U2 eulogized victims of the 9/11 attacks, projecting names on a banner. I cringed when Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s right breast and nipple. “Purple Rain,” from Prince, made me appreciate a day when the Chicago Bears didn’t show up. Why was Michael Jackson posing in silence for 90 seconds? Who knew what to do when a writer asked Mick Jagger, staring and listening, why he has sympathy for the devil?
How many Super Bowls have I covered? How many musical acts have I seen? Why even have a singer, Roger Goodell, if you care to think about the world and how anything prompts madness from sidewinding creeps? Bad Bunny? For levity, I’d choose Bugs Bunny. Why must the National Football League, which could push 140 million in viewership with Nielsen’s new measurement metric, do anything but make the audience laugh for a change?
Why anger people who are watching a game?
The Puerto Rican superstar, known as the King of Latin Trap, is a horror show for You Know Who. That will be a better show for the audience than the Packers and Chiefs. “I don’t know who he is. I don’t know why they’re doing it,” President Trump said. “It’s, like, crazy. And then they blame it on some promoter they hired to pick up entertainment. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.”
The promoter is Jay-Z. Goodell hired him when the NFL was staggering, helpless when Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem and said the league oppresses black people. Every year, the named performer catches hell, but this time, Bad Bunny is known for Spanish songs that dip into violence, sex, drugs and misogyny. “I bought a gun and shot up Cupid,” he warbled. He also has boycotted America because of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, though ICE also will be ready to shoot up Cupid during his performance in Santa Clara, Calif.
So the league brings in someone loathed by Trump, who is trying to deport Latinos. Why? “We’re confident it’s going to be a great show,” Goodell said. “He understands the platform that he’s on, and I think it’s going to be exciting and a united moment.”
A united moment, he thinks, as Bad Bunny is eyed down by Trump’s cops. Is the commissioner being real about life? Or is he dreaming again as he makes more money? “He’s one of the leading and most popular entertainers in the world,” Goodell said. “That’s what we try to achieve. It’s an important stage for us, and an important element to the entertainment value (of the Super Bowl). It’s carefully thought through. I’m not sure we’ve ever selected an artist where we didn’t have some blowback or criticism. That’s hard to do when you have literally hundreds of millions of people that are watching.”
The league’s marketing officer, Tim Ellis, was much stronger in his remarks. “There’s a lot of people right now who don’t like Bad Bunny being in the Super Bowl halftime show. Well, not everyone has to like everything we do,” he said. “Bad Bunny is f—ing awesome.”
The f-bomb was dumb and non-Goodellian.
It didn’t take long for Turning Point USA, founded by the late Charlie Kirk, to cite “The All-American Halftime Show” as secondary programming. Go online to see George Strait, a 73-year-old country singer, promoted as a replacement. Guess what? If Strait showed up, he’d also be threatened. It doesn’t matter in 2025.
My former takeaway was catching a major concert within the context of a championship game. Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, Paul McCartney, Beyonce, Lady Gaga: Fun, cool. I don’t have a problem with Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, who is Bad Bunny. Bugs is the smarter bunny.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.