Did Buffalo Bills Coach Sean McDermott tell the press that he will pull his team from the 2026 Super Bowl because of the National Football League's choice to make Bad Bunny the 2026 halftime performer? No, that's not true: The pages promoting the claim stated that McDermott made such remarks before journalists, but, in reality, no credible media organization reported that.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on October 1, 2025. It opened, using improper capitalization in the coach's last name:
BREAKING: Buffalo Bills coach Sean Mcdermott publicly criticizes NFL for choosing Bad Bunny to perform at Super Bowl halftime show: 'Is this football or a circus?' The NFL has been thrown into chaos after coach Sean Mcdermott threatened to pull the Bills from the game if Bad Bunny continues to perform at the Super Bowl. Details in the comments 👇👇👇
The comment section showed a News Today II article (archived here) with a long headline that repeated the post's wording verbatim. Later, in the body of the story, it offered a direct quote from McDermott. The article claimed he said it while talking to "the press after a team walkthrough":
This is the Super Bowl -- the ultimate stage for football. Is this football or a circus? If the league is more interested in flashy headlines than respecting the game, then maybe the Bills don't belong in that kind of show.
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of article at newtodayll.online)
Google News searches for the fragments of the exact quote attributed to McDermott, seen here (archived here) and here (archived here), did not yield any results.
Broader searches on Google News here (archived here) and here (archived here) and Yahoo News (archived here) didn't produce any reports corroborating the claim, either.
On September 28, 2025, the NFL announced (archived here) that its pick for the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show was Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (archived here), a Grammy-winning Puerto Rican rapper professionally known as Bad Bunny. Previously, the singer said (archived here) that he avoided performing in the U.S., being concerned that ICE may be outside his concerts.
Following the NFL's announcement, Chief Adviser to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski (archived here), said (archived here) that ICE will be present at the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.
The pages boosting the claim reviewed in this fact check appeared to have aimed at capitalizing on the use of the trending keywords from a widely discussed developing news story to increase their advertising revenue.
The News Today II website (archived here) that initially published the claim displayed an empty "About" section, and the website's name was missing the "s" from "news":
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of newtodayll.online)
The page on Facebook that promoted the claim was run by someone in Cambodia, according to that page's Transparency report:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of facebook.com/newsstoryi/about)
Facebook users can easily identify these types of accounts by accessing the transparency data.
