Counterprogramming the Super Bowl halftime show isn’t a new thing. Before it became the bloated, godless, all-encompassing monstrosity we see today, multiple entertainment brands and networks gave it a shot.
MTV tried it with Beavis and Butthead. The WWF (now the WWE) aired Halftime Heat wrestling matches between The Rock and Mankind. And, for 20-plus years, Animal Planet has offered us the Puppy Bowl.
But the first to actually dent the NFL’s ratings was Rupert Murdoch.
In 1992, Murdoch’s upstart Fox network counterprogrammed the Super Bowl halftime show with a live episode of its raunchy sketch comedy program, In Living Color. Fox drew between 22 and 25 million viewers — and Nielsen estimated that the Super Bowl lost 10 rating points and 20% of its total audience.
As The Guardian noted, the NFL was so shellshocked that Super Bowl planners immediately pivoted to the Gloved One:
“We [at the league] said, ‘This isn’t going to ever happen again,’” Jim Steeg, formerly the NFL’s senior vice-president of special events, told ESPN. “We had identified who we wanted to go after [for the next half-time show] by March. And we met with Michael Jackson’s agent.” At the very next Super Bowl in Pasadena, when Buffalo and Dallas ducked inside, the king of pop appeared at the 50-yard line and soaked in the adulation from the capacity Rose Bowl crowd before breaking into his jock anthem, Jam. A record 133 million viewers tuned in from the US alone.
Alas, Fox’s experiment was short-lived: In 1994, the network acquired the rights to broadcast NFL games, including the Super Bowl. Going forward, for very obvious reasons, Murdoch opted to cooperate with the NFL instead of competing against it.
Until last weekend, that was the end of the story. The Super Bowl halftime show had grown so massive — so star-studded — that nobody dared to take it on.
After all, Super Bowl Sunday has become an unofficial American holiday. Along with Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, it’s a defining symbol of Americana. Each year, the Super Bowl is, by far, the most-watched TV program in the U.S.
And lately, more people watch its halftime show than the game!
Those days are officially over.
Turning Point USA drew blood in its inaugural face-off by pulling in over 20 million fans, and that number is probably on the low end: The “All-American Halftime Show” was broadcast on multiple platforms, and TPUSA’s viewership on just one of ‘em — YouTube — is already at 21 million.
TPUSA conclusively proved the viability of its “halftime show” business model. And not just for the corporations, donors, platforms, and fans who already supported it, but for the artists, too:
This is wild! 3 of the top 4 songs on Apple's top sales charts are from the All-American Halftime Show 🔥🔥
— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) February 9, 2026
Kid Rock's new 'Til You Can't
Cody Johnson's original version of 'Til You Can't
Gabby Barrett's The Good Ones
We're running it back next year. Who should we book? https://t.co/mTtDvUdM0J
Which means, next year’s TPUSA halftime show will almost certainly be bigger, better financed, and FAR more heavily hyped.
And that puts the NFL on shaky ground: No longer can it force-feed whoever it wants on the public, because the public will walk. No longer can it take conservatives for granted.
Besides, it certainly seems like a good portion of its audience preferred Kid Rock:
The people have spoken. pic.twitter.com/XVOZGHYSq4
— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) February 10, 2026
At this point, it can’t even take NFL players for granted — because 97.7% of NFL player donations are actually sent to Republicans. (As for the NFL owners who pay Roger Goodell’s salary, they donate nearly 9-1 to Republicans.) The disconnect between the league’s left-leaning “content” and the ethos of the audience, the athletes, and the owners is striking.
So if the NFL doubles down on another left-wing, anti-Trump halftime headliner, it’ll drive millions of Super Bowl watchers to a competing program. And if that happens in back-to-back years, the NFL will have inadvertently “trained” audiences to check out the competition at halftime.
Once that becomes a habit, its monopoly is finished. It’ll be game over.
Which would cost the league hundreds of millions of dollars.
Prediction: Next year’s Super Bowl halftime show will go country. (Fun fact: The last of The Highwaymen, the incomparable Willie Nelson, has never performed at the Super Bowl.)
It has to go country, because it’s the only way it can retain its audience!
Otherwise, Goodell could once again put politics and/or virtue-signaling ahead of business, sign another left-leaning, bomb-throwing “superstar,” and watch TPUSA’s numbers double or triple: If they hit 20 million on Sunday, with enough hype, promotion, and lead-up, they could easily hit 50 million downloads next year.
And because watching the Super Bowl tends to be a group activity, those 50 million downloads might represent well over 100 million viewers! (For comparison, the 1993 finale of Cheers was watched by 42.4 million households, which NBC claims represented 93 million viewers.)
The choice is theirs.
Either way, we’re at the precipice of one of the most stunning cultural turnarounds in U.S. history: Even the Super Bowl isn’t “too big to fail.” Kudos to Turning Point USA for engineering the biggest Super Bowl upset since Broadway Joe and the New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts.
But next year’s halftime show will tell us if this was a one-off — or the death knell of the NFL’s halftime business model.
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First: It began with Mayor Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battlelines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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