Is It Over Now?

The arrival of the world's biggest pop star in the middle of the NFL season gave a boost to a league that didn't need one. But what happens next year?

There was one moment when I wondered, just a little, if it was an op.

Not the deranged conspiracies of recent weeks, mind you, when a shockingly large number of people proclaimed that the Kansas City Chiefs were in the Super Bowl in order to gain electoral support for Joe Biden via, of course, Taylor Swift. 

I mean, guys, come now. The Chiefs are in the Super Bowl a lot. They were winning the thing a couple of boyfriends ago, before Ms. Swift had even heard of Travis Kelce. If the Chiefs making the final game of the year was in fact part of some grand fix, how many people would have to be in on it? It would at least have included Tua Tagovailoa and Lamar Jackson, the opposing quarterbacks who each stunk against Kansas City in the playoffs. But it feels like there are easier ways to support Biden than playing terribly in the biggest games of your professional career.

No, the part I wondered about was during that Wild Card game against Tua’s Dolphins in Kansas City, when it was so cold that Patrick Mahomes’ helmet cracked during a tackle. Swift, up in the luxury suite in her custom-made Chiefs/Kelce jacket, found a moment to gaze thoughtfully out of the frosted glass window. Half of her face was blurred by the ice forming on the pane, the other half could be seen clearly. The camera shots of Important People in the suites are a staple of NFL broadcasts, with at least a handful during every game, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one that looked as much like art as Pop Star Peers Through Icy Window. Did she know she was composing a cool shot? Did she linger there to give the cameras time to frame her with her signature red lipstick just next to the frosted pane?

Almost certainly not, if we’re honest. A consistent theme of the Taylor-Travis Tour of 2023/24 is that she genuinely just seems to be having a great time watching her new boyfriend work. She shows up at games, pals around with prospective mother-in-law Donna Kelce and Jason Kelce, the polar bear of the NFL brothers, in the suite, and basically just does what a lot of spouses/partners/special friends of NFL players do, except for the part where she owns private jets, plural, and so has the rare ability to show up anywhere in time for kickoff, and with several friends/celebrities in tow. Pretty sweet deal, really. We now have the answer to the question, What if you started dating an NFL star AND you had all the money in the world?

I’ll say this again just as a caveat: I think it’s been funny to watch this play out, and to see the NFL try to walk the line between capitalizing on her fame while not going too crazy, all while a certain bunch of weirdos act like the very sport itself has been ruined by the occasional cutaway to a famous young woman going WOOOOO! (High five).

It’s been hilarious to see certain people argue, earnestly, that the presence of the world’s biggest pop star is somehow bad for the NFL business, just as it has been funny to see the NFL pretend that this is more than just incredibly good fortune for them. 

But I’m also curious to see where it goes from here. The Taylor effect that once just seemed anecdotally undeniable has since been backed up by hard numbers. NFL television ratings in the United States have increased by almost 10 per cent among teenage girls, and in Chiefs games where Swift was in the building, the viewership in that demographic jumped by as much as 50 per cent compared with the same week last season. “She knows great entertainment, and I think that’s why she loves NFL football,” commissioner Roger Goodell said last week. I’ll believe that is true when she shows up for a Cardinals-Panthers Thursday nighter.

The Super Bowl ended up delivering record ratings in the U.S. and Canada, suggesting that the piqued interest of non-football fans more than made up for the guys wearing 'GO WOKE, GO BROKE’ shirts who refused to watch the game. There was even a rom-com ending with a hug and kiss under the confetti, although in the rom-com the guy usually isn’t quite so sweaty.

But, can the Swift spike possibly last? I might be taking too much of my own experience into account, where my Taylor-mad teenage daughter had watched maybe 10 minutes of Chiefs football this season prior to the Super Bowl, but at some point the novelty of her presence in the building, coupled with the fleeting glances of her over a three-hour broadcast, has to wear off. Eventually you realize you are not watching Taylor Swift as much as you are watching a football game.

There’s the NFL and the media machine side of it, too. Swift has been an incredible content-generation vehicle for months now in a sport that really didn’t need any help, including for this very newsletter post, but assuming that the off-season proceeds as normal and that there isn’t a tragic breakup that leads to a 12-minute song and a video starring Chris Evans as the heartbreaker, is all this going to start over again in the fall?

As it happens, her GDP-boosting Eras Tour wraps its European swing in late August, as NFL training camps are winding down, and takes a lengthy break before dates in the United States and Canada in the fall. That leaves several weeks, at the beginning of Kansas City’s attempted three-peat, in which Taylor could, in fact, be waiting all day for Sunday night. To judge by the post-victory scenes in Vegas, she’s going to act like a regular person, not someone whose own celebrity provides a secondary story arc that television directors cannot resist.

The question is whether we will all get used to this, or still lose our collective minds at the fact that one of the league’s best players has an incredibly popular ladyfriend. As I sit here writing this, I realize it’s a dumb question. Of course it will be a circus again. When has ‘maybe this will all cool down eventually’ ever been a good bet?