Super Bowl LI XXXVIII in 2004, which also featured the New England Patriots against that season's NFC South champion Carolina Panthers. It was also the third time the Super Bowl has been played in Houston, with Super Bowl VIII in 1974 having been held at Rice Stadium. With the Astros baseball team reaching the World Series eight months later, Houston would become just the fourth city to host both the Super Bowl and Fall Classic in the same calendar year, following San Diego (1998), Detroit (2006) and Arlington, Texas (2011); and the first among the four to win the Major League Baseball championship.
Super Bowl XLIX viewers, with it reaching to 118.5 million during the Super Bowl XLIX halftime show featuring Katy Perry, and then peaking to 120.8 million during New England's fourth-quarter comeback. NFL owners initially voted in November 2005 to award a Super Bowl to Kansas City, Missouri, in honor of Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, the founder of the American Football League (AFL) in the 1960s who helped engineer the annual game. Then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue further announced on March 5, 2006, that Kansas City would host Super Bowl XLIX. However, the game was contingent on the successful passage of two sales taxes in