The 15 most controversial Super Bowl halftime performances of all time, ranked

While the Super Bowl halftime show is the most-watched event on television every year, it wasn't always the massive institution it once was.

Until the 1990s, the show was pretty lame. The NFL just booked a local marching band or some other kind of wholesome entertainment. There's a lot of Elvis Impersonators and trombones in halftime history.

But in the current era, the event is so big that the NFL has enough leverage to make performers pay to be there. And with scale comes a lot of uncontrollable factors. Year after year, the NFL struggles to entertain tens of millions of people and make a gigantic 12-minute show run smoothly.

The most famous Super Bowl performance is from 2004, where an "indecent exposure" from Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson changed the direction of the show forever. But it's not the only halftime show controversy.

Here are the 15 most controversial Super Bowl halftime show performances of all time.

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15: The Who was aggressively mediocre in 2010.

For whatever reason, the NFL hired a way-past-their-prime The Who to perform. The whole time, they seemed nearly bewildered to be onstage and were seemingly unprepared. The band never managed to connect to the audience, mumbled through a medley of some of their old songs, and Pete Townshend's stomach was visible for much of the show.

14: The Rolling Stones played some old stuff in 2006.

In the wake of the Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson fiasco of 2004, the NFl instituted a five-second tape delay that allowed them to censor phrases like "you made a dead man come."

For the most part, the Rolling Stones show was a mixed affair, with just three songs — one of them a new one, so no one could sing along. It was also a strange choice for the NFL not to have any black artists given that the game was set in Detroit.

13: The New Kids on the Block were so tepid that they were bumped till after the show in 1991.

In the early days of the glitzy halftime show tradition, boy band New Kids on the Block put on some slow songs, draining the room of all its energy, and performed "It's a Small World (After All)," making approximately the entire the stadium roll their eyes. ABC News opted to give a news report on the Gulf War instead of airing their entire show live, bumping it to after the game.