If you’re one of the 103.1 million Americans who have cleared customs and crossed over into the graying fiefdom of the Demographically Stateless, then you’ve probably come to terms with the prospect of your own impending nonexistence. Marketers assist in accelerating your transition from being the numinous object of desire to a sort of pervasive invisibility; on the day you reach your double-nickels birthday, your papers are found in order, and you are brusquely shunted into a state of statistical non-being.Which: Fine. We don’t want to buy your stupid hamburgers anyway.
Once you’ve exited that terminal 25-54 demo, one of the first things you’ll need to come to terms with is that the world is no longer _for you_. Upon being deposited into the scrubby wasteland of post-relevance, you’ll find that the cultural menu is no longer decipherable. The editorial board of _AARP: The Magazine_ won’t tell you this in so many words, but if you’d like to retain at least some semblance of dignity while you’re running out the clock, you’ll have to 86 your lifelong association with all things pop.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will have his demographic passport revoked in January of 2027, so he still has another 15 months left before his hot takes on the [Super Bowl](https://www.sportico.com/t/super-bowl/) halftime show dissolve into so much sclerotic hectoring. Johnson last week sounded off on the [NFL](https://www.sportico.com/t/nfl/)’s move to tap Bad Bunny as the headlining artist for the Feb. 8 spectacle in Santa Clara, telling a Beltway reporter, “It sounds like a terrible decision, in my view.” While the Speaker acknowledged that he had never heard of Bad Bunny prior to the league’s announcement, he went on to suggest that the Puerto Rican rapper isn’t big enough to merit such a lofty post. “It sounds like he’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience,” Johnson said, before segueing into the familiar choreography of the Won’t Somebody Think of the Children routine.
After Johnson gave his answer to that resolutely dumb question, several other luminaries took a whack at the zeitgeist piñata. President Trump gave Bad Bunny the thumbs down, and while he also prefaced his verdict with a disclaimer—“I never heard of him, I don’t know who he is”—POTUS characterized the choice as “crazy.” For her part, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem threatened to sic ICE on Super Bowl LX—Mr. Bunny is a vocal opponent of the agency—before issuing a blanket anti-everything assessment: “They suck and we’ll win and God will bless us.” Within the context of Noem’s interview with the podcaster Benny Johnson, “they” would seem to refer to the NFL itself.
If the sell-by date on the latest spasm of pearl clutching is rapidly approaching—somewhere Ken Burns is slowly zooming in on sepia-colored photographs of Bad Bunny as he preps a new doc on our American predilection for endless whining (working title: _The Taking of Umbrage One Two Three_)—there’s still time for the Chicken Littles among us to get all in a lather about how the NFL had damn well better change its tune. And while a number of outlets have suggested that the league should put the kibosh on its Bunny Bowl plans lest it jeopardize a pending $2 billion with ESPN, the exhortations for Roger Goodell and the boys to take a knee are grounded in a fundamental failure to understand the dynamics of power.
For all the Beltway jibber jabber, the NFL isn’t going to replace the hip-hop hare with a more MAGA-friendly performer, and it doesn’t take an advanced degree in economics to understand why any suggestion to the contrary is just so much noise. For starters, Bad Bunny is of a piece with the NFL’s plans for world domination. As much as it’s likely that even more Americans are familiar with the musical stylings of the global superstar who wrote that new song about Travis Kelce’s junk, the Borinqueño is (by at least one measure) in the same rare air as Chiefs superfan Taylor Swift.As of Thursday afternoon, Bad Bunny songs had been streamed more than 107.9 billion times on Spotify, putting his work right up there with Swift’s catalogue (112.7 billion). By way of comparison, the 82-year-old country singer Lee Greenwood, whom Speaker Johnson floated as a viable replacement candidate for the Super Bowl headliner gig, has racked up 96 million streams on the service. While that’s not a negligible count by any means, it also suggests that Greenwood’s music is roughly 1,124 times less popular than the NFL’s go-to guy. Or, more to the point: The Venn diagram of Lee Greenwood fans and Spotify users looks like Cookie Monster’s eyeballs.And that’s sort of the entire point of this exercise. At the risk of indulging in a little unchecked hyperbole, the NFL already owns the soul of every English-speaking man, woman and child in these United States. Now it’s time to convert the 42 million citizens who speak Spanish at home. And what better way to help bring a whole bunch of that 13% under the tent than by using one of the King of Latin Trap as a gateway drug? As the late Don Ohlmeyer was wont to say, “The answer to all your questions is money.” Simple as that.
Now, the prospect of a counter-programming move may not be entirely welcome in NFL circles, but such measures historically have fallen flat. (Noem isn’t the only American who can’t be bothered to flip over to the _Puppy Bowl_ during the song-and-dance break. She has her reasons.)
Only once has a rival broadcast siphoned off a significant number of Super Bowl viewers, and that was a one-shot deal. In 1992, Fox lured some 20 million viewers away from CBS’ coverage of Washington’s 17-0 dominance of Buffalo with a special live installment of the sketch comedy series _In Living Color_. The upstart network targeted younger fans who were pining for an alternative to a decidedly goofy Olympic-themed set—the Pride of Minnesota Marching Band! Brian Boitano! Dorothy Hamill! And bringing up the rear, Gloria Estefan!—and in so doing, stole away with nearly a quarter of CBS’ audience.
The NFL responded by booking Michael Jackson to headline the following year’s big show. And while this didn’t necessarily mark the end of the league’s hit-or-miss booking strategy—turns out that 1997 _Blues Brothers_ tribute featuring Jim Belushi and John Goodman wasn’t the product of a mass hallucination—the Wacko Jacko coup was a huge step forward for the NFL. The wholesome, toothy nightmare that was Up with People had been trotted out as headliners as recently as A.D. 1983, and somehow that wasn’t the worst halftime show on the books. (Try whatever it was that George Burns and Mickey Rooney thought they were getting up to in ’87. The Big Tuna deserved far better than that at the midway point of his first title.)
If Michael Jackson moonwalked so that Prince could show us the face of God with his brain-melting 2007 set, the NFL’s reaction to Fox’s inspired bit of devilry set the stage for the league’s eventual takeover of the American psyche. If a few million indignant fans elect to turn their attention to an alternative outlet when Bad Bunny takes the stage at Levi’s Stadium, so be it. Given the latest adjustments Nielsen has made to its ratings methodology, February’s broadcast is all but guaranteed to serve up at least 135 million impressions. While the Goodell gang would prefer that you remain glued to NBC, a rash of defections isn’t going to spoil the party.And save the blahblahblah about “boycotting” the Super Bowl, or the NFL as a whole, for someone who hasn’t heard this tiresome refrain a thousand times before. In the midst of the Colin Kaepernick kerfuffle in 2016 and into the following season, NFL ratings fell 8% and 10%, respectively. And while anti-activism sentiment may have contributed to some of that two-year stretch of ratings erosion, those seasons were also blighted by such audience-shrinking factors as an attention-gobbling presidential election, an outbreak of primetime blowouts and a sharp increase in average commercial minutes.The on-field product was found wanting, but the NFL’s TV partners didn’t take much of a financial hit. The final season of steep year-to-year audience declines was marred by only a slight dip in ad revenue, as the networks closed out 2017 with $2.42 billion in NFL sales, down just 1.2% versus $2.45 billion in 2016.Meanwhile, anyone who actually followed through on those long-ago threats to quit the NFL seems to have snuck back into the fold. Through Week 5, the league averaged 18.6 million viewers per window, marking the highest deliveries at that juncture since 2010 and earning bragging rights as the second-biggest season thus far on record. If you parted ways with pro football on ideological grounds, the Nielsen data would seem to suggest that the boycott didn’t stick. Either that, or you’ve been replaced—a prospect that happens to everybody, sooner or later.No sense in getting all heated about any of this—it’s just the way things work in the real world. But whatever form the next knee-jerk grievance takes, the NFL isn’t about to surrender the bag just because a bunch of malcontents threaten to take their custom elsewhere.
A gentle reminder: Once you cross over into the dimly lit territory of demographic irrelevance, nobody with skin in the game is likely to entertain your geriatric grousing. As an American, it’s your God-given right to piss and moan about everything that rouses your indignation, but bear in mind that after 55, only dogs and small children can hear you—and they’re not listening, either.