NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on Wednesday propagated a blatant falsehood in remarks about the league’s choice of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny as the act for the Super Bowl LX halftime show in February. According to Deadline, in defending the league’s pick that caused MAGA weenies to freak out and petition to have some 70-something year-old country star with a racist fanbase replace him – while also planning their own “halftime show” starring Lara Trump, Kid Rock, and probably Nickelback or Limp Bizkit – Goodell said “I’m not sure we’ve ever selected an artist where we didn’t have some blowback or criticism. That’s hard to do when you have literally hundreds of millions of people that are watching. But I feel confident that it’s going to be a great show. He understands the platform that he’s on, and I think it’s going to be an exciting and uniting moment.”
The falsehood was that the NFL never “selected an artist where we didn’t have some “blowback or criticism” for the halftime show. That is a lie, because Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were the halftime act during Super Bowl XLII. Everyone loves Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. There will never be a more perfect choice for a musical act to perform in the middle of America’s game.
Thus there was no controversy about the choice, two years into Goodell’s commissionership. Now 17 years later there is no real “blowback or criticism” either because the only people complaining about Bad Bunny are complete chodes who are free to watch Lara defile Tom Petty’s legacy and spirit.