Ranking The Halftime-Show Lineups
We don’t know how the performance will go when Maroon 5, Travis Scott and Big Boi take the halftime-show stage tonight. (Hopefully better than the controversial lead-up to the show.) But thanks to the research and analysis of FiveThirtyEight’s Gus Wezerek, we can already say where this lineup ranks in star power among modern-era halftime show acts. He gathered data on every halftime performer since 1991, grading them in a point system that rewards success on the Billboard Hot 100 chart before the Super Bowl in question. Then he added up the points for all the artists in a given haltime-show lineup. Here were the results:
This year’s group ranks seventh, which is far from the bottom of the list. But it’s also a far cry from our top-ranked halftime lineup, 2004’s combination of Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, P. Diddy, Nelly and Kid Rock. (And yes, we swear we didn’t tweak the numbers so that the most infamous halftime show in Super Bowl history also showed up as the most star-powered.)
