There are theme nights, and then there are theme nights that tell you exactly where a season stands. On Tuesday, October 13, Dancing With the Stars staged its first-ever “Super Bowl Night” — Week 5 of Season 35, with every couple dancing to songs drawn from iconic Super Bowl halftime performances, and NFL announcer Joe Buck sliding into a chair at the judges' desk as the season's first guest judge, as USA TODAY reported in its live coverage of the night. It was also, not coincidentally, the halfway point on the road to the finale — the week when a fun autumn distraction quietly turns into a real competition with a real pecking order.
By the end of the evening, both halves of that story had been told. At the top of the leaderboard, two couples earned the highest scores of the season so far, per USA TODAY — the kind of numbers that announce genuine contenders. At the bottom, the season said goodbye to its heart: Guillermo Rodriguez and Witney Carson, eliminated after five weeks in which they posted the lowest scores of the field week after week and were kept alive, happily and unapologetically, by the fans who loved watching them dance.
A Theme Night Built From Halftime History
The premise was irresistible, and smarter than it might sound. The Super Bowl halftime show is the biggest stage in American entertainment — twelve or so minutes watched by more people than anything else on television — and its songbook is a shared national memory: the anthems, the spectacles, the performances people still argue about decades later. Building a ballroom night out of that material gave every couple the same assignment in different costumes. Take a song engineered to fill a stadium, as USA TODAY's coverage of the evening framed the night, and make it fill a ballroom instead.
Buck's presence tied the concept together. A voice football fans have heard call the biggest games of their lives does not need to know a flecha from a fleckerl to understand performance under pressure, and as the season's first guest judge he brought an outsider's plainspoken energy to a desk that can, by Week 5, start talking only to itself. His scores mattered, too — as one breakthrough performance would prove before the night was out.
Tatyana Ali's Salsa, and the 8 That Said Everything
If one routine captured the night's upward arc, it was Tatyana Ali's. Performing with pro Jan Ravnik, Ali danced a salsa to Kendrick Lamar's “squabble up” — a halftime pedigree of the freshest kind, and a song that gives a dancer nowhere to hide. The judges rewarded her with 29 out of 40, per USA TODAY, and the detail on that card told the real story: the score included her first 8 of the season, and it came from Buck, the guest at the desk.
The panel praised her improvement, and that word — improvement — is the currency of the season's middle weeks. Plenty of contestants arrive polished. The ones who last are the ones the audience can watch getting better in real time, and a 29 with a first-ever 8 from a football announcer who owes nobody in that ballroom a favor is improvement you can measure. Ali and Ravnik left the floor not just safe, but rising — exactly the trajectory a couple wants at the halfway point, when the finale stops being an abstraction and starts being a bracket.
Two Couples Set a New Bar
Ali's 29 was not the ceiling. Two couples earned the highest scores of the season so far, per USA TODAY — the kind of season-best form that recalibrates what everyone else has to aim at. In a season's first month, high scores are compliments. At the halfway point, they are statements of intent, and they change the math for the entire middle of the pack: routines that would have been safely impressive in Week 2 are, by Week 5, merely the price of staying in the conversation.
That is the quiet drama underneath a night like this one. Super Bowl Night was built as a celebration, and it played as one — big songs, big energy, a guest judge from the other biggest show in American television. But it also drew the season's first hard line between the couples dancing for the mirrorball and the couples dancing for one more week.
Safe, One by One — Then Two Couples Left Standing
The results segment played out the way it always does, in descending order of comfort. Announced safe, per USA TODAY's coverage, were Julia & Ezra, Maura & Mark, Jackson & Emma, Harry & Jenna, Amber & Pasha, Jenna & Val, Tatyana & Jan and Connor & Rylee — a roll call that mixed the night's high scorers with its survivors, each couple exhaling in turn as the floor emptied around them.
That left two couples standing: Guillermo Rodriguez & Witney Carson, and Tyler & Sharna — Tyler dancing with pro Sharna Burgess, as USA TODAY's coverage of the season has identified the pairing. One of those two couples had the momentum of the night's results behind it; the other had something harder to score. When the verdict came, it fell the way the leaderboard had been predicting for weeks — and the way a large, loud part of the audience had been dreading.
The Fan Favorite Goes Home Smiling
Guillermo Rodriguez and Witney Carson were eliminated after five weeks — five weeks, it has to be said, that the scorecards alone would never have granted them. They posted the lowest scores of the field each week, and each week the vote carried them through anyway, because what they were selling was never really technique. They were fan favorites for their joy: the sense, rare on competitive television, of two people who seemed genuinely delighted to be out there, and who made a studio audience and a home audience feel delighted along with them.
Rodriguez left the way he had danced. “I had a lot of fun; it was great,” he said, per USA TODAY — and he thanked Carson for teaching him to dance, a grace note that landed precisely because it was true. Whatever the judges' paddles said across five weeks, a man who arrived as a beloved television personality and departed as someone who can actually dance has not wasted his autumn. Carson, for her part, did the pro's hardest job this season: not choreographing a contender, but building a dancer out of a beginner in public, and making the building process the most joyful viewing on the show.
There is a real argument that runs like Rodriguez's are what the format is for. The mirrorball will go to the best dancer; it usually does. But the reason millions watch in October rather than simply checking the result in December is the underdog who dances with his whole heart at the bottom of the leaderboard and survives on love. For five weeks, that was Guillermo Rodriguez. The competition is more serious without him, and a little less fun — which is the same thing everyone says, every season, about exactly the contestant they will miss most.
The Halfway Point Changes Everything
From here, the season compresses. The halfway point to the finale means every remaining couple is now dancing in elimination arithmetic, and the gap Super Bowl Night exposed — between the season-best top, risers like Ali, and a crowded, scrapping middle — will only widen. Readers catching up can revisit how the week was set up in our Week 5 theme preview, and how the field got here in last week's Mariah Carey Night elimination. For the rest of tonight's premieres and finales, see our coverage of the VisionQuest premiere on Disney+ — and keep the news front open as the fall season turns toward November.
Correction (October 14, 2026): An earlier version of this story scored the night on a 30-point scale and described the two leading couples as 'perfect-scoring.' The leaderboard runs to 40 — four judges, including guest judge Joe Buck — so Tatyana Ali's 29 was out of 40, and the night's top marks of 36 were season-best scores, not perfect ones.
Sources · 2 sources
- USA Today — Super Bowl Night live coverage, October 13, 2026
- TV Insider — Super Bowl Night recap, October 13, 2026
