declared \u201cICE out\u201d to begin a Grammy Awards acceptance speech<\/a> the previous night \u2014 Goodell had a diplomatic but seemingly pointed response about the artist\u2019s performance on the NFL\u2019s biggest stage. Something along the lines of: That was the Grammy\u2019s platform. This is the Super Bowl platform. Bad Bunny knows the difference.<\/p>\nOr as Goodell put it:<\/p>\n
\u201cListen, Bad Bunny is \u2014 and I think that was demonstrated [at the Grammy Awards] \u2014 one of the great artists in the world, and that\u2019s one of the reasons we chose him. But the other reason is he understood the platform he was on and that this [Super Bowl] platform is to use to unite people and to be able to bring people together with their creativity, with their talents, 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\u2019ll have a great performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"SAN](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/832fa4f7-b51e-4a80-b4d0-1947e1dc2a23.jpeg\"\/)
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An advertisement for the Super Bowl halftime show featuring Bad Bunny is seen at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. (Photo by Chris Graythen\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
(Chris Graythen via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t explicitly say Bad Bunny would stick to music. He didn\u2019t explicitly say Bad Bunny wouldn\u2019t stick to music. (Bad Bunny might have further more to say on the matter Thursday, when he\u2019s scheduled to hold a news conference in San Francisco as part of Super Bowl week\u2019s promotional festivities.)<\/p>\n
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This is how you stay as neutral as possible if you\u2019re Goodell \u2014 but it\u2019s also partly a byproduct of the reality that the NFL doesn\u2019t really know for sure what is going to happen Sunday. Nor do we as an audience. Sometimes we even watch more closely because we think something might happen. See Kendrick Lamar\u2019s \u201cNot Like Us\u201d cut from last year\u2019s halftime show, when he looked into the camera and spit out the dicey lyrical bar that could have easily been barred by the league: \u201cSay Drake, I hear you like \u2018em young \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
To this day, I\u2019m not sure how \u201con board\u201d the league was with that moment. But with some artists, that\u2019s part of the halftime attraction. For a league that levitates between being buttoned up at times \u2014 but loose and edgy in others \u2014 the Super Bowl halftime has become a pursuit of trying to have it all. It\u2019s partially why the NFL partnered with Jay-Z\u2019s entertainment company, Roc Nation, in 2019 to collaborate on choosing halftime artists. To test boundaries \u2014 or at least give off the appearance of testing boundaries.<\/p>\n
Even before that, the NFL hasn\u2019t been able to control everything in halftime shows, whether the controversies or statements by artists were real or perceived. The infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction in Super Bowl XXXVIII was clearly not league approved. Super Bowl XLVI, when artist M.I.A. flipped off the crowd in full view of the television audience? Not approved. Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s rendition of \u201cFormation\u201d in Super Bowl 50 was approved and it still sparked a sizable backlash from a portion of viewership that believed it was pushing anti-American and\/or anti-law enforcement themes. Even during last season\u2019s Super Bowl, a supporting performer hoisted a flag with \u201cSudan\u201d and \u201cGaza\u201d on it, in an apparent protest to ongoing conflicts in those regions.<\/p>\n
There have been other moments, too, but the point is the NFL has only limited control of what happens Sunday.<\/p>\n
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Goodell knows this. And it\u2019s part of why he has gotten fairly adept at keeping himself and the league out of corners when politics and the NFL intersect. He learned lessons from the first Donald Trump presidency, when the league navigated (often clumsily) through an anthem-kneeling controversy, the rise of social justice consciousness after the murder of George Floyd, and then a politically supercharged COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
You learn to listen more closely, pick your battles more carefully, and to watch for corners that you can\u2019t get out of easily. Perhaps most of all, when it comes to balancing a high-wire act between the league\u2019s bottom line and politics, you lean toward the money until you absolutely can\u2019t.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what I thought of when I listened to Goodell on Monday. After months of culturally and politically charged denouncement of Bad Bunny as a Super Bowl halftime show \u2014 much of it driven by the Puerto Rican star\u2019s Spanish-language music \u2014 the NFL\u2019s reach for a larger imprint on global Latin American countries was going to test Goodell and the league\u2019s team owners, especially at a time when detainment and deportation efforts from the current Trump administration against immigrants suspected of living in the country illegally have targeted Latin American communities inside the United States.<\/p>\n
From the moment of Bad Bunny\u2019s appointment as the centerpiece of the NFL\u2019s halftime show, Goodell and the league\u2019s franchise owners were stepping into a dispute with a segment of their own fan base. It would instantly be a political lightning rod in a country that has a mountain full of them. And it didn\u2019t take long for Trump and leaders in Homeland Security to decry it as a halftime that promoted an anti-American agenda. Or for Turning Point USA to tap Kid Rock and other artists to create an alternative halftime show that, as Kid Rock put it this week, will \u201c[P] lay great songs for folks who love America.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Playing songs for people who \u201chate America\u201d isn\u2019t what the NFL is trying to pull off. A more dialed in reality is what Patriots owner Robert Kraft told his team\u2019s flagship radio station about the league\u2019s priority moving forward<\/a>: \u201cWe\u2019re gonna push like the dickens now, to make international [exposure] more important with us.\u201d<\/p>\nYou do that by embracing a halftime artist that has gotten arguably as much attention as the game itself. You do that by reaching out to a global Latin American audience that may not naturally overlap with your NFL audience, but suddenly feels drawn in by Sunday\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n
An artist who told a Grammy audience \u201cICE out\u201d on the doorstep of Super Bowl week, but who followed that statement with this message:<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe\u2019re not savage. We\u2019re not animals. We\u2019re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans. Also, I want to say to the people, I know it\u2019s tough to, not to hate on these days. And I was thinking, sometimes we get contaminados [contaminated]. \u2026 The hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. So, please, we need to be different. If we fight, we have to do it with love. We don\u2019t hate them. We love our people, we love our family, and that\u2019s the way to do it. With love. Don\u2019t forget that, please.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN JOSE, Calif. \u2014 The messages in NFL commissioner Roger Goodell\u2019s pre-Super Bowl news conference this week were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[436],"tags":[23632,49,48,25103,30532,1718,514,24178,5886,1739,82,19501],"class_list":["post-454901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-bad-bunny","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-chris-graythen","tag-halftime-show","tag-new-england-patriots","tag-nfl","tag-roger-goodell","tag-san-francisco","tag-seattle-seahawks","tag-sports","tag-super-bowl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}