Lindsey Stirling Apologizes To Fans After NBC Barely Shows NFL Thanksgiving Halftime Performance
Dancer, violinist and America's Got Talent alum Lindsey Stirling feels for her fans who tuned into NBC's Thanksgiving-night broadcast of the Packers-Dolphins game only to be shown barely 10 seconds of her halftime show performance.
Stirling and her dance troupe performed during halftime at Thursday's NBC Sunday Night Football contest between the Green Bay Packers and Miami Dolphins at Lambeau Field. NBC, however, mostly filled the break with (per USA Today) a feature about Dolphins fullback Alec Ingold's origins as a Green Bay native.
Coming out of the pre-taped package, NBC showed a few seconds of Stirling's on-field performance, then cut to commercial.
"So disappointing!" one fan shared on Instagram. "We were excited to see Lindsey Stirling and stupid NBC played commercials instead." Stirling — who has nearly 4 million Instagram followers, and 14 million on her YouTube channel — re-posted that lament on Friday afternoon, adding, "I'm sorry to all my fans who stayed up to watch. We performed our hearts out in the freezing cold for 6 minutes straight."
In a Friday post to X, Stirling wrote, "Thank you so much to the @packers for having us and for treating us like queens! Thank you to all the Green Bay fans for being so enthusiastic during our performance. It was a night I'll never forget — my first stadium performance.
"Sorry to all my fans who tuned in to watch and didn't get to see it," she added. "I appreciate all the posts of support." (Stirling also asked fans to "forgive my floppy foot kick towards the end. Haha my legs were numb by that point.")
You can see how cold it was in the clip below:
Per USA Today, an NBC Sports rep claimed that the network has "presented an in-depth, human-interest feature during halftime of the Thanksgiving primetime game each year since 2013, often followed by a brief showing of the in-stadium performance."
In 2010, at the age of 23, Stirling was a quarter-finalist on Season 5 of NBC's own America's Got Talent. Her eponymous debut album was released in September 2012, after which she launched her first North American tour. Stirling has toured every year since (save for a pandemic-related hiatus); her current Snow Waltz Tour is in Indiana tonight, then heading to St. Louis, Mo., Wichita, Kansas and Lubbock, Texas, with near-daily stops elsewhere through Dec. 22.