Roger Goodell just watched Bad Bunny perform the Super Bowl halftime show almost entirely in Spanish – and then called him "one of the great artists in the world" while half of America was turning off the TV.
Two weeks later, the man who threw more touchdown passes than almost anyone in NFL history sat down with Tomi Lahren on OutKick and said exactly what tens of millions of fans have been screaming at their screens for a decade.
Brett Favre just confirmed that the NFL stopped caring about you – and he can't figure out why they'd be that stupid.
Brett Favre to OutKick: The NFL Stopped Caring About Its Real Fans
Lahren asked Favre what millions of fans already know in their bones – that somewhere around Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the sideline in 2016, the NFL decided its core audience wasn't worth protecting anymore.
Favre didn't dodge it.
"I think there probably is some truth to that," Favre told Lahren on her OutKick show this week.
He described the football audience as "people like you and I" – fans who love the game, who built the league into the most-watched television property in American history, who watched with their fathers and grandfathers and passed it down.
"You want to appeal to your true fans," Favre said. "And it doesn't seem like that is the case anymore."
That's a Hall of Famer, a three-time MVP, the man who defined Green Bay football for a generation – telling you straight: the league moved on from you.
Why Conservatives Are Calling for Roger Goodell to Be Fired
The NFL's answer to Favre's audience isn't a secret.
While Goodell's league has committed over $350 million to its "Inspire Change" social justice programs since 2017, painted "End Racism" in the end zones every season, and expanded the Rooney Rule with draft pick incentives for teams that develop minority coaches – they handed the Super Bowl halftime stage to Bad Bunny, an artist who screamed "ICE out!" from the Grammy podium the week before.
House Speaker Mike Johnson called it a "terrible decision." Karoline Leavitt told reporters Trump would "much prefer a Kid Rock performance." Trump went to Truth Social immediately after the show and called it "absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER" – a "slap in the face" to the country.
Goodell's response? He doubled down, standing at his podium and calling Bad Bunny "one of the great artists in the world."
Posts calling for Goodell's firing have since racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The fans Favre is describing aren't just changing the channel – they're done with the man running the league.
The NFL Is Playing With Fire
Favre has been saying this for years.
Back in 2021, he told the Daily Wire that sports used to be the one thing that unified America across every divide – and the NFL turned it into another front in the culture war.
"Something's got to unite us," Favre said then. "And the games or sport in the past has been some kind of unification. Now, it's almost like a division."
That was before Bad Bunny. Before "ICE out." Before Goodell sneered at the fans who built his league.
Here's what Roger Goodell still refuses to understand: NFL games accounted for 92 of the top 100 most-watched television programs in America in 2025. That number exists because of the exact audience Favre is describing – the people who grew up with the game, who tailgate in November cold, who handed down their team loyalties like a family heirloom.
The NBA went all-in on progressive politics after 2020. By 2021, the NBA Finals had lost nearly 50 percent of its audience from pre-protest levels. The league spent years trying to claw those viewers back.
Roger Goodell is watching that happen in slow motion and calling it unity.
Sources:
- Ryan Morik, "Brett Favre blasts NFL for no longer appealing to 'true' fans: 'There's been a slight shift,'" Fox News, February 20, 2026.
- OutKick Staff, "Brett Favre Rips The NFL For Abandoning Longtime Fans On Tomi Lahren Show," OutKick, February 19, 2026.
- "Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show ignites Trump's fury, divides viewers," Fox News, February 9, 2026.
- "NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell Faces Calls to Be Fired," Newsweek, February 2026.
- "Despite appearances, the NFL still pays lip service to 'woke' crowd," Just the News, October 6, 2025.
- Brett Favre, interview with Andrew Klavan, The Daily Wire, April 2021, via The Federalist.