The Super Bowl, unstacked
What Substackers thought of the game, the halftime show, and the ads
Another Super Bowl has come and gone. Everyone agrees on the winners—the Eagles and Kendrick Lamar—and the losers: the Chiefs, Drake, and a booed Taylor Swift. But that’s where the consensus ends. Here’s how Substackers across the platform analyzed the game, the ads, and the halftime show.
The context
Matt Ripple: It’s Super Bowl Sunday—and over 100 million Americans will be watching, plus another 50-or-so million globally, braving brutal time zones to catch the action and its cultural spectacle.
Subomi: Beyond the game itself, the Super Bowl has evolved into a global spectacle—blending advertising, sports, music, fashion, and entertainment into one massive cultural moment.
Matt Ripple: [W]hen it comes to the Super Bowl, it’s a fact that the majority of viewers aren’t viewing for the love of the sport. The bigger draw is the overall fanfare: the off-the-field storylines, the halftime show, and the pinnacle event in advertising. Or should we say what was once the pinnacle of advertising….
Julie Vick: I do not get excited about watching the Super Bowl, but I do get excited about eating Super Bowl snacks.
Arif Hasan: One of the outstanding things about the Super Bowl is that even if the game is a boring blowout—which it was this year—it can provide us with a window into so many other elements surrounding the NFL landscape and culture at large.
The game
Stefen Rosner: On Sunday night, the Kansas City Chiefs looked to join an elusive list of franchises in sports history to win three straight championships. But the Philadelphia Eagles said not so fast, as they put up 40 points in a 40-22 victory.
Neil Paine: The story of Super Bowl LIV was, of course, about the winning Philadelphia Eagles: the excellence of Jalen Hurts, the acquisitions of key players like Saquon Barkley and Zack Baun, their ferocious play in the trenches and elite balance across both sides of the ball. But by nature of whom they beat, the story was also about the losing Kansas City Chiefs—whose bid for the first Super Bowl three-peat fell one win short in the end.
Dave Pell: The team you hate the most got crushed by the team you hate the second most. Welcome to what amounts to joy in 2025.
Neil Paine: From the first few minutes of the second half onward, the Chiefs’ win probability never crept above 1 percent again, and the three-peat evaporated into the New Orleans night. It was a testament to the Eagles’ ability to wrest away control of the Super Bowl script from a team whose victories have seemed all too inevitable in recent seasons.
Halftime show
Subomi: The talk of this year’s Super Bowl has to be this year’s halftime performance by Kendrick Lamar, fresh off winning five Grammy Awards, including Record and Song of the Year for “Not Like Us.” Kendrick’s performance sparked conversations beyond hip-hop, making his performance not just entertainment but a statement.
The Daily Chela: Lamar’s halftime performance made history, marking him as the first solo rapper to take center stage during the Super Bowl, showcasing both his artistry and his impact on global culture.
Tiffani Lashai Curtis: [T]he Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper, petty Gemini sun, and expert storyteller gave us a performance that was for us, by us. And he did it while wearing a pair of bootcut/flared-leg jeans that were perfectly molded to his body—apparently the jeans are by the brand Celine. But I know vintage American Eagle jeans when I see them.
Alanna Vizzoni: It was hard for me to enjoy the halftime show because I was so distracted by Kendrick Lamar’s jeans.
Amaya Lim: And the chain! A for Aubrey? A for America, lowercase in a blatant show of disrespect? A for A minor? The last one is most likely, but I think there are layers to Kendrick’s choices, and what he wears is onscreen for the entirety of the performance—he certainly put thought into all of it.
Alice Liddell: The show on February 9 was nothing short of spectacular, brimming with powerful messages that had fans buzzing on social media. The resounding takeaway? Don’t mess with Kendrick Lamar.
Amaya Lim: This image has got to be one of the best things to come out of American television in years. Kendrick actually says Drake’s name, on live international television, and gives him this smile: “I hear you like ’em young.” The whole stadium said “A minor.” Drake is cooked.
Shit You Should Care About: Serena Williams came out and crip walked, which is symbolic for a few reasons. (1) Because the media tore her to shreds for doing it on the court at Wimbledon, and (2) because Drake was once rumored to have dated her (or at the very least had an obsession with her).
Anita Schillhorn: I watched the Super Bowl with a group of people who weren’t that familiar with Kendrick Lamar. His symbol-rich halftime show started with him kneeling (yes, like Colin Kaepernick) on a GNX, the car that his most recent album was named after. He had Samuel L. Jackson playing Uncle Sam, interpreting and critiquing the songs he played—and echoing a lot of the critique and complaint about his performance I was hearing from my fellow living-room pundits. His dancers formed an American flag as he critiqued the nation, with Trump watching … and rumor had it that Trump left the stadium. And of course he teased, then dropped, his Grammy Award-winning Drake-burying hit “Not Like Us.”
Mikayla Bartholomew: If Kendrick Lamar has taught me anything, it’s that I’m not being a hater loud enough.
The ads
Subomi: This year, it wasn’t just a showdown between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs—it was also a battleground for top brands going head-to-head to win most memorable and engaging Super Bowl commercial.
Shiv Singh: Super Bowl ads are massive investments, but the real question isn’t just about cost—it’s about strategy, timing, and impact.
Arif Hasan: This year’s Super Bowl ad spree features advertisements for all sorts of artificial intelligence products; some are from companies dedicated to providing generative AI as their primary product, like OpenAI, while others are focusing their ad space for their AI offering—Google is advertising Gemini, Microsoft is showcasing Copilot, GoDaddy and Salesforce are highlighting the AI tools within their platform, and Meta is advertising its … sunglasses?
Norman Weiss: With a few notable exceptions—Nike’s “So Win” spot, which pushed back against the “no win” situation in which female athletes are often trapped, was terrific, as was Kieran Culkin’s sassy voice work as a beluga whale for NerdWallet—this year’s Super Bowl commercials did not live up to the hype.
Mary Lemmer: To me, it seemed like celebrity appearances substituted for good, clever writing and implementation of an ad.
Anita Schillhorn: As usual the simplest, most visually compelling ads broke through, like Instacart’s ad uniting a disparate bunch of brand characters, and ahem, my agency’s own spot for Little Caesars.
Mary Lemmer: Squarespace’s “Tale as old as websites” ad gets the trophy from me. It was clever, creative, and memorable!
Clare Michaud: I find the Squarespace Ireland commercial deeply offensive lol a website doesn’t “make it real” leave the beautiful country of Ireland alone.
Final thoughts
Cam Higgins: The Super Bowl is a reminder of our weird, postmodern, late-capitalist, consumerized, digitized, in-it-together-whether-we-like-it-or-not-ness. Love it or hate it, we’re all gonna watch it. And we’re all gonna talk about it.
Dave Pell: [D]idn’t this year just feel a little less Super Bowl-ish than usual? Maybe it was the non-competitive game. Maybe it was that Patrick Mahomes was outed as a human being. Maybe it was that in the age of sociopolitical uproar, marketers played it particularly safe with their commercials. Maybe it was the first-time attendance at the game by a sitting president, which added a political undertone during one of the communal moments we were all hoping would provide a brief respite from politics. Maybe it’s that the halftime show, while good, required some backstory and analysis in a year when we probably could have used the simplicity of Left Shark. Maybe it’s that we’re no longer allowed to eat all the carb-heavy snacks that once dominated game days. (My 3-layer dip included Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy.) Meh, maybe it’s just that my team wasn’t in the game.
What’s so curious to me is how little was said in all of the Substack voices about the actual game. I’m a big, serious football fan. let me tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed that Philly defensive masterpiece. It allowed their offense to shine. Total domination over the #1 team in the NFL takes a lot of strategy and execution. Something that seems to have been lost on most all of you.
No mention of the courageous protestor among Kendrick Lamar's dancers who, during a song, pulled out the flags of Sudan and Palestine and drew the crowd's attention to SUDAN and GAZA, then ran around displaying the flags until he was tackled, apparently by Secret Service men, who then dragged him away, so that HRH Trump would not be offended over his new real estate.