Taylor Swift's in a league of her own
IT’S her league, we’re all just watching. After she turned up to MetLife Sunday with her squad to cheer on beau Travis Kelce as his Chiefs played the struggling Jets, it’s official: Taylor Swift is the NFL’s new overlord. Until a few minutes ago, off-field romances were relegated to the gossip pages and fodder for the clever sports Twitterati (or Xerati, I guess). But they were rarely dignified by the gridiron media poobahs and broadcasters.
Enter the 33-year-old cultural sensation.
It’s ‘Sunday Night Swift’
Since Swift attended last week’s game at Arrowhead Stadium, sitting with Kelce’s mother Donna, all pandemonium has broken loose in the National Football League.
Bill Belichick, a known Swiftie and also a known curmudgeon, deemed it worthy of his input, remarking that the tight end has had “a lot of big catches in his career. This would be his biggest.”
All week, the “Shake It Off ” singer led tons of Week 3 post-mortem coverage, with Erin Andrews admitting to freaking out on her arrival in Arrowhead. And normally serious sports journos were jockeying for any Swift scoop.
Not all was glowing. It sent the ever-apoplectic “First Take” personality Chris “Mad Dog” Russo into one of his trademark tirades, saying Mama Kelce didn’t want Swift there, adding, “Enough already. All Fox cared about Sunday was showing Taylor in the booth . . . Let me watch the football.”
But as far as the NFL and the broadcasters are concerned, naysayers be damned. Last night’s “Sunday Night Football” on NBC felt like T Swift with a side of pigskin.
After all, news of her presence turned what would have been a forgettable match-up with the Aaron Rodgers-less Jets into the hottest ticket of the season.
For days, the network had been teasing the game with Swift’s hit, “Welcome to New York” and The New York Times ran a piece looking into how the network prepared, specifically, to cater to the new, pop-obsessed audience.
The broadcast opened with footage, not of Kelce or Patrick Mahomes or Zach Wilson in warmups, but of Swfit’s athletic feat of walking through the stadium metal detectors.
The program then cut to Carson Daly on the set of “The Voice” as he specifically addressed non-football watching Swifties, laying out the matchup in rudimentary terms, like Kamala Harris explaining the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Before kickoff, there was conveniently a commercial for Swift’s upcoming concert movie, hitting theaters Oct. 13, followed by another ad with Kelce shilling for Pfizer.
Anyone foolish enough to play a drinking game, imbibing when Swift appeared or was referenced, would have needed to be rushed to the hospital to have their stomach pumped by the second quarter. (The Athletic counted that the camera flashed to her 17 times throughout the night.)
Girl power play
And yet, this was the entree. Broadcasters in earlier games served up hors d’oeuvres, dropping gratuitous Swift references all day.
During the Atlanta-Jacksonville matchup at Wembley in London, Chris Fowler and Co. discussed her upcoming shows there — in June.
And as the camera panned over Mama Kelce during the Washington-Philadelphia game (Travis’ brother Jason plays for the Eagles), Joe Davis and Daryl Johnston quipped that one Kelce playing in Philly and the other in NYC was “Taylor made” for their mother, who could make a “Swift trip” up to the Big Apple.
This is not only evidence of the increasing pop-culturization of sports, but the Taylor Industrial Complex.
Right now, she’s bigger than the pope — and to some just as infallible. Her ability to sell her own and others’ talent is so superb, it makes Kris Jenner look like an MLM girl boss hawking leggings.
The evidence was being distributed in real time with NBC sideline reporter Melissa Stark giving us the latest stats on Kelce’s brand: He’s gained over 900,000 new Instagram followers and his jersey sales are in the top five of the league. Kelce’s podcast “New Heights” was also No. 1 on Apple last week.
For years the NFL has tried to engage more female fans with retail offerings: at first, crappy pink shrunken jerseys and later campaigns in fashion magazines. They also adopted the Crucial Catch campaign for breast cancer awareness.
But fumbles in that effort have ranged from the horrific — the 2014 video of Ray Rice beating his wife in an Atlantic City elevator — to the offensive: Cam Newton laughing at a female reporter asking about routes.
Then poof, last week, lady viewers aged 18-49 were up 63%, according to Front Office Sports. Maybe Swift’s takeover is the official “the future is female” revenge.
Romance strategy
For me, it all brings to mind last season’s “Pardon My Take” interview with Arian Foster, who said the NFL was “rigged.” It was clearly a joke, but maybe there is some pro wrestling-style kayfabe off the field.
This Kelce-Swift courtship feels like it was born in the league’s marketing office, with Pfizer executives and the pair’s reps all cooking up this arrangement like Hollywood power-brokers of yore.
Obviously the spotlight-loving Kelce has been launched into another stratosphere — perfectly setting up a postplaying career (he’s 33). And she gets a romantic palate cleanser after dating The 1975 singer Matty Healey, who some fans deemed unsavory.
Swift is normally private during her relationships and capitalizes on the backend, writing bangers about how crappy they were. Here, she’s cashing in up front. It’s naked commercialism at play.
Sure it’s a touch of fun but it veers on becoming crass and off-putting to real fans. And in the unlikely event that Kelce drops a few consequential passes, she’ll be booed in Arrowhead — a latter day Jessica Simpson, aka Yoko Romo.
But whatever happens, Swifties will always remember when she became the NFL’s first female commissioner.