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 counterprogramming to its goal of ensuring that the halftime show is as much of a spectacle as the game itself, which has complimented the absolute dominance of the Super Bowl in television viewership. Besides a string of halftime shows from 2006 to 2011 that featured veteran rock acts in the wake of the Super Bowl XXXVIII "wardrobe malfunction", the practice of inviting pop acts to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show has continued. The Super Bowl XLIX halftime show featuring Katy Perry was seen by 118.5 million viewers, as part of an overall telecast that was the most-watched television broadcast