NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hasn’t said much in public about Bad Bunny’s controversial Super Bowl halftime performance – but in private he’s taking a victory lap, On The Money has learned.
“Goodell thought it was great,” said one media executive who spoke to the commish in the aftermath of the performance.
The woke spectacle drew significant ratings, although they dropped by the minute as the Spanish-only rap routine unfolded. The 31-year-old left-wing rapper from Puerto Rico – aka Benito Antonio Ocasio – took jabs at the president’s rollback of illegal immigration and preached Pan American multiculturalism during the biggest game of our country’s most popular sport.
“He said it was the right thing to do because we (NFL) have to expand our demographic,” according to the source who spoke with Goodell. “He said it was purely a business decision.”
As we have reported, Goodell’s embrace of woke policies – virtue signaling about social justice in endzone displays and on helmets, using DEI to hire coaches and league personnel, and picking for Bad Bunny for the big game’s halftime show – is designed to expand football devotees beyond the typical right-of-center male that still dominates its fan base.
He thinks the gambit will bring in more women and minorities as viewers; that means more people buying expensive NFL sponsored merchandise, filling stadiums and remaining glued to the TV sets. He believes his core audience is so hooked on the game — because of its hard-hitting plays and a steady diet of addictive sport-gambling opportunities – that they will keep tuning in.
And it doesn’t matter how much progressivism he shoved down their collective throats.
An NFL rep has not returned our repeated attempts to for a comment on the entire Bad Bunny imbroglio. So I’ll let my sources who follow the sport-business world fill the gaps.
First, Goodell billed Bad Bunny as a performance that will “unite” football fans. In his words: “This platform is used to unite people and to be able to bring people together with their creativity, with their talent, and to be able to use this moment to do that. I think artists in the past have done that. “I think Bad Bunny understands that and I think he’ll have a great performance.”
“Great,” as it turned out, was a show by a singer whose lyrics were hard to decipher because he was often mumbling and in a foreign language. If you don’t believe me, check out the footage of confused people in the stands while Bad Bunny did his thing.
“Uniting” is another canard. If anything, the performance emerged as yet another episode in the ongoing culture war, maybe the most unfortunate outcome for something as simple as watching a football game. Liberals like former president Barack Obama lauded the performance for its alleged underlying message of inclusion; conservatives saw it as a farce directed at Trump and his supporters (around 50% of the country) who reject multiculturalism and Bad Bunny’s open-borders politics.
Goodell has made no secret that he wants to expand the NFL into Latin America so maybe there’s a method to his madness. Or maybe not; as we reported the game peaked at 137,826 viewers during the 15 minutes which spanned the second quarter of the game. It was all downhill from there during Bad Bunny’s pretty bad rapping that is until the third quarter began and rating turned positive again.
Maybe people hated Bad Bunny’s underlying message, or maybe they just couldn’t understand what he was saying. Or maybe it’s time for Roger Goodell to realize the customer is always right and abandoning your core consumer is always a risky bet. If it weren’t, Bud Light, which got clobbered with its commercial featuring a trans woman in a bubble bath, would still be our No. 1 beer.
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