Dancing With the Stars Super Bowl Night: Guillermo Rodriguez's Run Finally Ends as Jenna Dewan and Ezra Frech Tie at the Top

Every season of Dancing With the Stars has one contestant the judges keep scoring like a contestant and the audience keeps treating like a headliner. This season, that was Guillermo Rodriguez — and on Tuesday night, in Week 5 of Season 35, the audience finally let go. Rodriguez and his partner Witney Carson were eliminated on the show's first-ever Super Bowl Night, closing one of the most charming survival runs in recent memory and clearing the way for a tie at the top between Jenna Dewan and Ezra Frech.

The theme was a clever one: all 11 remaining couples danced to songs by past Super Bowl halftime performers, with ESPN's Joe Buck joining Carrie Ann Inaba, Bruno Tonioli and Derek Hough as a guest judge, pushing the scores out of 40. According to TV Insider's recap, the night even opened with some football royalty in the room — Season 3 champion Emmitt Smith and Donald Driver appeared in the opening number, a nice wink at the theme before the real competition started.

The Goodbye Everyone Saw Coming — and Dreaded Anyway

Rodriguez and Carson danced a salsa to a Bad Bunny halftime favorite, and the judges' paddles told a familiar story: a 22 out of 40, built from 6s by Inaba and Buck and 5s from Hough and Tonioli. It was the lowest judges' total of the night, and this time the combined weight of scores and viewer votes was too much for his fan support to overcome. For weeks, that support had been the story — the votes kept arriving no matter what the leaderboard said. On Tuesday, they finally ran out.

The human moment of the night belonged to Rodriguez and Inaba. Per the recaps, she had told him the previous week that he seemed to have lost his joy on the floor. He called her out on it before dancing — and then went out and earned exactly the 6 she gave him, with Inaba saying he had brought the joy back. It is a strange, sweet epitaph for a DWTS run: the score that ended his season was also a small reconciliation. He did not leave as a punchline. He left having made a judge smile on his way out the door.

A Tie at the Top, and It Was Not Close Behind Them

While the bottom of the leaderboard resolved itself, the top turned into a genuine race. Jenna Dewan and Val Chmerkovskiy earned 36 out of 40 for a paso doble to a Lady Gaga number — four 9s across the panel, the cleanest card of the night. They were matched, score for score, by Ezra Frech and Daniella Karagach, whose salsa to a Nelly hit also drew all 9s for a 36. Two couples, two completely different dances, one shared perch — and the kind of tie that makes next week feel like a playoff game.

The chasing pack was tight and talented. Amber Glenn and Pasha Pashkov scored 34 for a samba. Three couples landed on 33: Maura Higgins and Mark Ballas, whose tango to a Rihanna song came with Higgins dancing through a neck injury picked up in rehearsals — the sort of detail that reframes every point on that card — plus Julia Stiles and Ezra Sosa, whose jazz routine featured a cameo from her Save the Last Dance co-star Sean Patrick Thomas, and Harry Shum Jr. and Jenna Johnson with their samba to an Usher track. Jackson Olson and Emma Slater earned 31, including Olson's first 8s of the season, a milestone that matters more in October than the raw total does.

The Rest of the Leaderboard

Below them, the middle of the pack did what the middle of the pack does on this show: survived, mostly. Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess scored 30, Tatyana Ali and Jan Ravnik took 29 for a salsa to a Kendrick Lamar song, and Connor Wood and Rylee Arnold finished on 25. When the elimination came down, the last two couples standing were Tyler and Sharna alongside Guillermo and Witney — with the show's usual caveat that the final two standing are not necessarily the actual bottom two in the combined vote.

As USA Today's live blog tracked the night in real time, the arc was easy to feel: a beloved underdog's farewell, a pair of near-perfect scores at the top, and a field that is quietly separating into contenders and survivors. Last week it was Ciara Miller who went home; this week the show lost its heart. The competition is better for having had Rodriguez in it, and it is also, undeniably, more serious now that he is gone.

What Super Bowl Night Proved

Theme nights can be gimmicks, but this one did real work. Halftime-show music is engineered for maximum crowd response, and it forced every couple into big, legible, audience-first dancing — no hiding in moody contemporary pieces. Dewan's paso doble and Frech's salsa were the two routines that best understood the assignment: attack the song, fill the floor, give four judges nowhere to hide. Both got rewarded with the same number, which feels right.

Hosts Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough kept the evening moving, Buck acquitted himself fine as the guest at the desk, and the show — which airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on ABC and Disney+ — heads into its next week with a clear top tier, a crowded middle, and one less fan favorite to scramble the math. That is usually when this competition gets good. For more of tonight's premieres and finales, see our coverage of the VisionQuest premiere on Disney+ and the Tyson docuseries premiere, and keep the news front open as the fall TV season rolls on.