Each time in its nearly 60-year history, putting on the Super Bowl halftime show gets harder. Sometimes the logistics get complicated by concerns about protecting the turf. On other occasions, some aspect of the show leaks online, as happened last year ahead of Kendrick Lamar’s performance. In the lead up to Bad Bunny’s performance at Super Bowl LX, I wondered if worries about the possible presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the Big Game would be the King of Latin Trap’s biggest hurdle.
It wasn’t. It was trying to fulfill Bad Bunny’s wish to transform the field at Levi’s Stadium into his home of Puerto Rico.
That one was Bruce and Shelley Rodgers’ problem to solve. Their company, Tribe Inc., has been producing the show for nearly two decades and the pair have become de facto experts in how to pull off increasingly elaborate stage productions during the allotted 26 or so minutes of the halftime show.
For Sunday’s performance, situated in the middle of the Seattle Seahawks’ rematch against the New England Patriots, the issue was horticultural. Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, wanted his show to have the same look and feel as his recent Puerto Rico residency, which covered stages in palm trees and sugar cane to recreate the environs of Vega Baja, where he grew up.
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In a different stadium, that could be done by rolling carts covered in those plants onto the field. But San Francisco’s Levi’s Stadium uses natural grass; the National Football League’s guidelines don’t allow that many carts onto the field, as they’d tear up the grass. The max the team could use was 25, and they needed those for the stages and other props.
Bruce Rodgers’ fix was simple: dress people up like plants.
As viewers saw at halftime, Bad Bunny, who performed in all-white outfit with a number and “Ocasio” on the back like a football jersey, did get to dance around the set he wanted—the casita, the vintage truck, the wedding stage—but the plants were alive in a way he might not have imagined. Some 380 people donned costumes to make them look like tall stalks of grasses. The stationary palm trees and poles, if you’re wondering, were rolled out much in the same way the streetlights were placed for Lamar’s street scene from Super Bowl LIX. On Sunday, they hit their limit of 25 carts, equipped with so-called “turf tires,” and got everything safely on and off the field.
There were other obstacles, too. For instance, there’s only one main field tunnel at Levi’s Stadium—and the venue is open-air. Lamar was able to use the darkness provided by the Caesars Superdome for dramatic effect during his 2025 show, but Bad Bunny couldn’t do the same.
“It’s all done in daylight,” says Shelley Rodgers, who serves as the show’s art director and won Emmys for her work on Rihanna’s halftime show in 2023 and the one that Dr. Dre headlined in 2022. “You don’t get the theatricality of nighttime.”
As viewers saw on Sunday, the plan worked. Starting at the casita (where Pedro Pascal, Cardi B, and Colombian singer Karol G made cameos) and performing his way through the field, Bad Bunny sang a litany of hits, from “NUEVAYoL” to “Monaco.” He also danced with surprise guest Lady Gaga, who performed “Die with a Smile” during an elaborate wedding scene. (If you’re wondering, yes, that couple was real and about to get married. Benito has gotten hundreds of wedding invites from fans over the years and he wanted to oversee at least one couple’s nuptials, Bruce Rodgers says.) He ended by carrying a football through the end zone followed by a parade of people carrying the flags of countries throughout the Americas while the message “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” lit up the screen behind him.
“It ties together the music and sports aspects,” says Shelley Rodgers. “It’s saying ‘We’re all the same, and we’re all on this journey together.”
Bob Ross, the effects consultant who orchestrated the pyrotechnic display during the finale, says Sunday’s fiery arsenal was the biggest of any Super Bowl halftime show in the last two decades or so. All told, Bad Bunny’s set required 9,852 of what Ross calls “theatrical pyrotechnics” like colored smoke and fireworks. This includes the finale’s massive Puerto Rican flags, which lit up the sky as the performers left the field. The point of the big ending was to build on the energy of the music, dancers, and Bad Bunny himself to make something “extremely dynamic,” Ross says. “We’re an exclamation mark to a performance.”
For Bruce Rodgers, the institutional knowledge necessary to give artists what they want is hard-won. It all goes back to the first Super Bowl halftime show he ever worked on: Prince. That 2007 performance, which Prince famously performed in the Miami rain, brought the traditional theatrics of a stadium rock show to a football game. As the roster of halftime performers has expanded to include the likes of Rihanna and Lady Gaga, and concert tours have evolved into massive Vegas-style productions, Rodgers has had to push the limits of what can be done on the playing field in 26 minutes, while also managing the dreams of artists about to play for roughly 100 million people worldwide.
“We’re in a frenzy of a world now show-business-wise, where everybody knows that artists can pull off great things,” Bruce Rodgers says. “It makes our world a little tougher because we still have seven-and-a-half minutes to get it in, a 12 or 13 minute show, and then six minutes to get it off.”
Not only was Rodgers, who calls Bad Bunny a “sweetheart,” trying to not “squash any dreams” for the show, he and his wife were also working on a much more truncated timeline than in years past. Generally, the artists’ concept for the halftime show gets approved around Thanksgiving. Then the team has a couple months to fabricate, source set pieces, and figure out all the logistics. This time around, it wasn’t approved until around the new year—partially because of negotiations between what Bad Bunny was hoping for (those carts full of vegetation) and the solution the Rodgers’ provided (hundreds of costumed extras).
“It was very dramatic and intense,” Bruce Rodgers says. But ultimately it made a better show. Nick Pappas, the NFL’s field director, says that if you look at the total footprint of the show—carts, stages, costumed humans—”this might be our biggest one yet.”
Bad Bunny’s performance comes at a markedly fraught time for America and American sports. When the NFL announced in September that the superstar would be headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, MAGA influencers went on a social media campaign decrying the fact that he “doesn’t sing in English.” The artist, who took home three trophies at last weekend’s Grammys, has not performed in the continental US as part of his current world tour over fears of ICE raids happening at his concerts. As a longtime supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, there was speculation—and even betting lines—he would wear a dress during Sunday’s show. (He clearly didn’t.)
A week before the Big Game, Bad Bunny became the first artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year for an all-Spanish record. Earlier in the night, when DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS won Best Música Urbana Album he took the stage and said, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ‘ICE out.’ We’re not savage; we’re not animals; we’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” He got a standing ovation.
A few days after the NFL’s announcement this fall, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem’s chief adviser, Corey Lewandowski, went on the conservative podcast “The Benny Show” to say Game Day attendees could be subject to scrutiny from border patrol agents. “There is nowhere that you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally,” Lewandowski said. “Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else.”
The NFL stuck by its decision to have Bad Bunny headline. “Not everyone has to like everything we do,” the league’s chief marketing officer Tim Ellis told The Athletic. “Bad Bunny is fucking awesome.”
Months later, the situation has only grown more tense. The Trump administration has beefed up ICE’s presence in several US cities, particularly Minneapolis. In January, ICE agents shot and killed US citizens on two separate occasions. Their deaths have sparked demonstrations across the country calling for the end of ICE actions.
On the other side of the world in Italy, as Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo was preparing to host the 2026 Winter Olympics, protesters took to the city’s streets to decry ICE’s presence at the Games. US officials claim ICE agents are only in the country to aid in security—not perform immigration operations—but still hundreds of people showed up in Milan’s Piazza XXV Aprile on January 31 to demand they leave. Since the Games began, several American Olympic athletes have expressed conflicted feelings about competing for the US.
Though President Trump attended Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, he told the New York Post he will not attend this year’s game in the San Francisco Bay Area because it’s “just too far away.” He was also irked at the inclusion of pre-game performers Green Day, claiming the vocally anti-Trump band will “sow hatred.”
Last Monday, Turning Point USA, the right-wing student organization cofounded by the late Charlie Kirk, announced the lineup for its own All-American Halftime Show, which will be headlined by Trump supporter Kid Rock. The organization teased the event for months, billing it as an alternative to Bad Bunny’s set. In a press release, Kid Rock said he’s approaching the show like David vs. Goliath (he’s David in this scenario): “[Bad Bunny] said he’s having a dance party, wearing a dress, and singing in Spanish? Cool. We plan to play great songs for folks who love America.”
Whatever backlash the NFL faces for Sunday’s performance, the league is poised to come out ahead, says Jared Bahir Browsh, the director of the Critical Sports Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. The league has been growing its international audience of late and Bad Bunny is a worldwide phenomenon. “As much as we have seen complaints about the conservatism of the NFL, their bottom line is still focused on revenue and the publicity behind the pick (both good and bad) for Bad Bunny—and to a lesser extent Bay Area locals Green Day—is worth it,” he says.
As folks gathered to watch one of the biggest American sports events on Sunday, excitement for Game Day was mixed with anxiety. To ensure safe viewing, the Working Families Party planned Super Bowl watch events in several US cities, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, Jersey City, Philadelphia, and Columbus, Ohio. “Events like these where fans can safely gather, organize, and celebrate together are becoming more and more vital,” organizers wrote in their announcement of the “Bad Bunny Bowl” watch parties.
On Sunday, there was significant security in place for the game, there were no reports of ICE immigration activities near Levi’s Stadium. Earlier in the week the NFL and California governor Gavin Newsom said on Thursday that he had been assured there would be “no immigration enforcement tied to the game.”
The goal of Bad Bunny’s performance, Shelley Rodgers says, wasn’t to be overtly political, or to respond directly to the response from the right. “It’s more about unity,” she says.
Bruce Rodgers notes that a lot of the statements Bad Bunny wanted to make about inclusiveness around the show were made with the teaser he released last month. “It’s a really fucking cool message,” he says. “I think he knows that people are going to make news out of whatever he does; the Illuminati guys on YouTube will make Illuminati stories,” so the point was to keep the show’s message straightforward. He performed in Spanish. Fans danced. More than 100 million people watched. Then the game resumed, and the internet got flooded with commentary and hot takes.
Prior to the game, pro boxer/influencer Jake Paul posted on X that he was “purposefully turning off the halftime show,” calling Bad Bunny a “fake American citizen … who publicly hates America.” As a Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is a US citizen. Paul and his brother Logan both have posted videos from their multimillion-dollar homes in Puerto Rico.
President Trump critiqued the halftime show on Truth Social, calling it “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER.” About Bad Bunny, he posted: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.”
Several folks on X seemed to think Bad Bunny’s “Ocasio” jersey was for US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rather than the artist’s last name. Others, meanwhile, noted that Bad Bunny was the only one performing well at the Super Bowl given the relatively low score at halftime (the Patriots ended the half without scoring a single point).
When we spoke before the Super Bowl, Bruce Rodgers brought up Left Shark, the awkward dancer in a shark suit who upstaged Katy Perry during her 2015 performance and became an internet talking point for weeks after. Tribe, Inc., of course, also designed that show. He wonders if Sunday’s plant costumes will take off in the same way.
“Our team designed Left Shark, but as soon as that thing went viral, Katy Perry said she did it all,” Bruce Rodgers says, somewhat jokingly. “If these costumes are a success, I want my name on ’em, because it was my idea. If they’re not a success and a meme, then it was all Shelley’s idea. No, I’m kidding.”
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