And Then There Were Two: The Super Bowl Halftime Dilemma

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There’s an old saying in football. If your team has two primary quarterbacks, you actually have none. That’s because your quarterback must stand out, excel, be the undisputed leader, and be respected by the rest of the team universally. When you have two of them, it’s usually because both of them are inferior, and are failing at their job.

This year, the Super Bowl will have two halftime performances, which in truth means that it will have no true halftime performance at all because neither will command the universal audience it needs to bring the United States together, which the Super Bowl is supposed to do.

Beyond being a football game, the Super Bowl has become one of the most important musical events of the entire year. This is because of the massive audience the event draws. It’s also because of all the secondary musical performances beyond the halftime show, including the National Anthem, “America the Beautiful,” and the numerous other high-profile pregame performances.

But now that you have two halftime shows instead of one, it parses the audience, polarizes both sides, and destroys the unipolar moment the Super Bowl once presented. Just like everything else in American culture, the Super Bowl Halftime Show has now been bifurcated and Balkanized like the results of a bad divorce.

On Monday (2-3), conservative political organization Turning Point USA announced the lineup for their long-threatened alternative halftime show in response to the NFL and Jay Z’s Roc Nation booking Bad Bunny as the 2026 Super Bowl halftime performer. Called the “All American Halftime Show” focusing on “faith, family, and freedom,” the TPUSA presentation will feature Kid Rock, Lee Brice, Brantley Gilbert, and Gabby Barrett as performers.

In many respects, the NFL egged this on by booking Bad Bunny in the first place, which has turned out to be quite a polarizing pick. Though the Puerto Rico native’s music is super popular worldwide and he just won the 2026 Grammy for Album of the Year, he doesn’t perform in English. Though some especially uninformed critics have claimed he not even American (yes, Puerto Rico is a US territory), the Bad Bunny performance seems like yet another effort by the NFL to expand its reach into Central and South America as the interests of core NFL fans go under-served.

Even then, Bad Bunny is not a bad pick. Perhaps if skeptical fans gave him an opportunity, they would like his music. Country music fans have been interfacing with Spanish language songs for decades from artists like Johnny Rodriguez, The Texas Tornados, and The Mavericks. Down in Texas, it’s common to hear a song in Spanish at a dancehall or honky tonk.

But as Saving Country Music has been pointing out for years now, you have to go all the way back to 1994 to find the last and really only time country music was featured during the Super Bowl halftime. Clint Black, Tanya Tucker, Travis Tritt, and The Judds performed that year. That means it’s been 32 years since country music was featured. There hasn’t even been a country artist featured as a guest in 23 years when Shania Twain appeared briefly with No Doubt.

Instead, it’s been a steady diet of pop, rock, and most-recently, hip-hop performers during the Super Bowl halftime after the NFL partnered with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation in 2019 as their official “Live Music Entertainment Strategists.” Completely ignoring large swaths of the American population with their Super Bowl halftime was bound to result in a backlash at some point. It appears 2026 is that year.

The NFL could have booked Luke Combs to perform who then could have brought out Tracy Chapman for their version of “Fast Car.” Or they could have booked Chris Stapleton who’s universally beloved, or even George Strait who is responsible for the 2nd and 4th biggest ticket events in North American history. Someone launched a petition to get Strait to be the halftime performer that now has 120,000 signatures. Zach Bryan is now responsible for the #1 ticketed event in North American history, and would have been a good selection.

Country music is as hot as its ever been, and if the NFL had booked Post Malone or Garth Brooks, they probably wouldn’t be fielding this problem right now. Dolly Parton is one of the few universally beloved personalities still left out in American culture. Some surmise with a new football stadium being built in Nashville, when that lures a Super Bowl to Music City, they’ll do a big country music bash. But ignoring country music, and the tastes of core NFL fans for so long has created the appetite for alternative programming.


Kid Rock is commonly misappropriated as a country star, which he categorically isn’t, even if he owns a home and bar in Nashville, and has released a few country songs in his career. Lee Brice, Brantley Gilbert, and Gabby Barrett are very much of the country universe, even if all three strongly inhabit the B-level of country music has-beens.

It looks like country music finally did get it’s Super Bowl halftime we’d all been clamoring for, but it’s not exactly the one we ordered up.

Lee Brice is good for a few good songs (“I Drive Your Truck”), but his career was wrecked by the Curb Records talent retention program that stifles the output of artists so they can never fulfill their contracts. It’s been 6 years since Brice officially released an LP. Gabby Barrett is barely more than a one hit wonder (2020’s “I Hope”). And Brantley Gilbert, well, he’s always been a laughing stock, and was partially responsible for giving birth to the scourge that was Bro-Country.

Specifically, Brantley Gilbert was previously universally repudiated for a terrible performance at a Monday Night Football game, and regularly turns in tracks deemed some of the worst “country” songs of all time. He’s a yoke around Turning Point USA’s presentation whether they know it or not, and will be a useful idiot/ meme generator for all those who are sure to satirize and slander the alternative halftime show irrespective of how good it is. This lineup is a great example of how politics is a terrible curation point for music.

Say what you want about Kid Rock though, he knows how to put on a show, and he has a huge following. That’s the reason he’s the spearhead of the massive “Rock the Country” traveling festival happening for the second year in 2026, which is its own whole drama-filled and politically-charged topic to be dealt with at a later time.

Who knows, the whole All American Halftime Show could go off like the XFL, and become a laughing stock of history and a boondoggle for promoters. They definitely would have been better served by trying to put put together some bigger and better talent for the show.

The Puppy Bowl might pull in equivalent numbers, though perhaps curiosity, or even the car crash factor might result in elevated ratings for the Kid Rock show regardless of the quality of the presentation. And for sure, half of America will be rooting for this alternative halftime show to spectacularly fail, while the other half will be rooting for a ratings cratering for the official one.

And in many respects, that’s the biggest problem with this entire thing. We’re dividing ourselves down the middle, rooting for the demise and failure of the other half, even though our destinies are all intertwined and our communities commingled. We couldn’t commence a civil war even if we wanted to, since the battle lines would be drawn right down the middle of states, communities, neighborhoods, and sometimes even families and households.

Now even cultural touchstones like the Super Bowl and music are being asked to choose sides, usurping their important capability of bringing people together across the ideological strata. Things like the Super Bowl halftime show are being used to divide and conquer. Whatever Super Bowl halftime show you watch will be a litmus test. And as long as we’re all warring over trivial things like the Super Bowl halftime show, we’re ignoring how we’re all being fleeced by the super elite, and larger swaths of our country get engulfed by the homelessness and addiction crisis.

If you have two quarterbacks, you have none. If you have two halftime shows, you have none. And if you have two countries attempting to live side by side while undermining each other at every turn, you have no country. And that’s no damn way to win a football game.

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