Was it because of the alternate halftime show?
The ratings are finally in, and for the first time in five years, viewership for the Super Bowl halftime show actually declined over the previous year.
Of course the Apple Music halftime show was controversial as soon as it was announced that Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny would be headlining, drawing criticism for his outspoken statements against President Donald Trump and his immigration policy. Many conservatives saw his selection as a middle finger to Trump and vowed to boycott the show, and Turning Point USA even organized an alternate halftime show in response.
The stakes were obviously high for everybody involved: If the Turning Point USA All-American Halftime Show turned out to be a flop that nobody watched, it would show the NFL that the conservative outrage really didn’t matter in the end. And if Bad Bunny didn’t draw the numbers the NFL was looking for in attempting to appeal to a broader community, there’s no doubt it would be blamed on the conservative boycott and the TPUSA alternate broadcast.
So what do the numbers say?
Well first the good news for the NFL: The halftime show drew an average of 128 million viewers, making it the fourth highest viewed halftime show on record, behind Kendrick Lamar in 2025, Michael Jackson in 1993, and Usher in 2024.
The bad news though? For the first time in 5 years, Bad Bunny failed to increase the viewership from last year’s halftime show.
In 2025, Kendrick Lamar set a record with an average of 133.5 million viewers. That was an increase of more than 10 million over Usher in 2024, who drew in an average of 123.4 million. And in fact, the audience for the halftime show had grown every year since The Weeknd performed in 2021 – until this year.
Naturally, the first instinct for conservatives was to claim victory and point to the Turning Point USA halftime show as the reason for the year-over-year decline. The alternate broadcast, which featured Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice and Gabby Barrett, peaked at around 6.1 million concurrent viewers on the TPUSA YouTube channel alone, and if all 6 million of those changed the channel at halftime, that would have put Bad Bunny’s viewership in record-breaking territory.
But that doesn’t tell the full story: Super Bowl viewership overall also declined year-over-year for the first time since 2021, with an average of 124.9 million viewers compared to 2025, which averaged 127.7 million viewers. (Both games sucked, so it’s hard to say that viewership declined this year because of the blowout when last year’s game was just as bad).
A minute-by-minute analysis of the game does show a fairly significant drop in viewership around the start of halftime:
And looking at last year’s data from Samba, while it does show a decline at halftime, it appears to be not quite as steep: While viewership of this year’s halftime show dropped to 88%, in 2024 it remained at around 95% before dropping as the halftime show went on.
So what can we take from the numbers? I think it’s clear that the selection of Bad Bunny and the Turning Point USA halftime show had SOME measurable impact on halftime show viewership, and there’s no doubt the NFL isn’t happy about losing any viewers.
But the more worrisome trend for the NFL is that, in a year when sports are drawing record numbers, including for the NFL and college football, the league’s biggest game saw a year-over-year drop, despite the fact that the Kansas City Chiefs were out of the picture for the first time in a while and the game featured two teams that hadn’t been in the Super Bowl in a few years.
For Turning Point USA though, I think it’s clear that their halftime show was a massive success for them, even if it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much they were responsible for the viewership decline.
