Two careers that began the same year, in opposite genres, kept circling back to the same rooms for over a decade. Then the NFL handed out its biggest stage, and only one of them got the call.
Carrie Underwood sang the opening of NBC’s Sunday Night Football again this past season, her thirteenth year running the job. She has still never been asked to headline a Super Bowl halftime show. Rihanna, who had no real history with the NFL at all, was asked once, in 2023, and her performance broke the record for the most watched halftime show ever televised.
There isn’t a clean explanation for why one of those things happened and the other still hasn’t. That gap, more than any awards tally, is what makes Underwood and Rihanna worth putting side by side.
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Two very different starts in 2005
Underwood won the fourth season of American Idol in 2005. Her first single, “Inside Your Heaven,” debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. She remains the only solo country act to manage that in the entire decade.
Rihanna signed to Def Jam that same year and released “Pon de Replay,” a dancehall pop single that reached the Hot 100 top ten months before her debut album, Music of the Sun, came out. She was a teenager from Barbados working with a label built around pop and R&B radio, about as far from the country charts as the industry gets.
Neither woman had any reason to expect the other’s career would keep crossing hers. It kept happening anyway, starting at the one ceremony that puts every genre in the same room.
The Grammy nights that lined up a year apart
Underwood made her Grammy debut at the 49th Grammy Awards in February 2007, winning Best New Artist and Best Female Country Vocal Performance. She beat James Blunt, Chris Brown, Imogen Heap and Corinne Bailey Rae, an unusual result for a country artist in a category that almost always goes to pop or R&B.
A year later, at the 50th Grammy Awards in February 2008, Rihanna won her first Grammy, Best Rap/Sung Collaboration for “Umbrella” with Jay Z. Taylor Swift and the Colombian singer Juanes presented her the award. Swift, like Rihanna, was a first time nominee that night. Underwood and Rihanna were photographed backstage together a few hours later at the Staples Center.
By November 2016, their award totals had drifted into an odd kind of parity. Gold Derby, the awards prediction outlet, reported that heading into that year’s American Music Awards, Underwood and Rihanna were tied at nine AMA wins each, both two wins short of the ceremony’s all time top ten winners list. Three months later, at the 59th Grammy Awards, the two were backstage together again.
Thirteen years of Sunday nights, one night in February
Underwood took over the Sunday Night Football opening in 2013, replacing Faith Hill, who had held the job for six seasons. She also sang the national anthem at Super Bowl XLIV in 2010, the closest she has come to the league’s biggest broadcast. Fans have asked publicly, almost every year since, why the NFL has never given her the halftime show itself. The league has never publicly explained why. During Super Bowl LX weekend this past February, the closest Underwood got to the show was a recorded clip of her performing “The Champion,” aired during the broadcast. The halftime slot went to Bad Bunny.
She has also been fairly direct about what the weekly job actually pays. Asked whether NBC compensates her for opening Sunday Night Football, she told Howard Stern:
“No, it’s pretty pro bono.”
She added that she wished it paid better.
Rihanna’s route to that same stage looked nothing like this. She had no ongoing relationship with the NFL and had not toured since the Anti World Tour ended in 2016 when Apple Music and Roc Nation booked her for the Super Bowl LVII halftime show at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, in February 2023. Partway through the performance, she announced she was pregnant with her second child.
Nielsen later revised its figures and confirmed the show had drawn just over 121 million viewers, making it the most watched halftime performance in Super Bowl history, ahead of Katy Perry’s set in 2015. It also picked up five Emmy nominations and won one, for production design.
The reaction wasn’t universal praise. The Federal Communications Commission received more than a hundred complaints about the performance, with some viewers calling it too sexual for a family broadcast. Shaquille O’Neal defended her a few days later on his podcast: “I was there. It was beautiful. She did a great job.” None of it slowed the numbers down. The viewership record stood.
| Carrie Underwood | Rihanna | |
|---|---|---|
| Years opening Sunday Night Football | 13 | 0 |
| Relationship with the NFL before a halftime offer | 13 years | None |
| Super Bowl halftime shows | 0 | 1 |
| Viewers for that halftime show | Still waiting | 121 million, a record |
Underwood spent over a decade building a reputation for showing up, largely unpaid, and has still not been given the industry’s biggest stage. Rihanna skipped that entire decade and broke the viewership record the first time she was asked.
Two bets, both still open
None of this adds up to one industry making one consistent judgment. The NFL, the Recording Academy and the American Music Awards are three separate organisations that have never coordinated on anything, and it would be a mistake to read Underwood and Rihanna’s overlapping numbers as proof of some single, unified verdict on either woman. What the numbers actually show is two very different strategies for building a career, both still running.
Underwood is thirteen seasons into Sunday Night Football, sits as a judge on American Idol, runs her own wellness brand, HiNote, and keeps up a touring schedule that has not slowed down. None of that consistency has bought her the one invitation everyone assumes she has earned by now.
Rihanna has not released a full album since Anti in 2016. A ninth record has been rumoured for years, with no confirmed date. Disappearing and then delivering one enormous night worked exactly once, at the Super Bowl. It has not produced anything since.
Neither woman knows yet if her approach was the right one. The industry that keeps rewarding one and ignoring the other hasn’t worked that out yet.
