By Benjamin Hoffman
The Kansas City Chiefs won their third Super Bowl title in the past five seasons by beating the San Francisco 49ers in overtime 25-22 on Sunday. While some NFL players go their entire career without winning a championship, one of Kansas City’s newcomers came away a winner in their 13th game.
Taylor Swift, who has been dating Travis Kelce, Kansas City’s star tight end, changed the NFL conversation all season, attracting a new audience for the league and inspiring strong emotions (both positive and negative) among fans. And, as expected, she was at the stadium and cheering on Kelce and the Chiefs in their come-from-behind win.
After the game, Swift celebrated on the field with Donna Kelce and the rest of Kansas City’s friends and family as Travis Kelce sang a truly memorable rendition of “Viva Las Vegas.”
She then found Kelce to celebrate after his speech.
“It was unbelievable,” she said to him in a video shot on the field after the game. “It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever experienced.”
Kelce was asked after the game if any couple had ever had a better week than Swift winning two Grammys and Kelce winning the Super Bowl.
“On top of the world right now, baby,” he said. “It’s a good feeling.”
Was there any doubt she’d go?
Swift, as you may have heard, is good at keeping secrets. Her plans, beyond concert dates, are rarely announced in advance. That has led some to devise their own methods for figuring out what she’s up to. Before a Kansas City game in October, for example, an NBC producer said he had a spotter plane searching the area around MetLife Stadium for police escorts in hopes of alerting the television crew if she showed up. (She did.)
Kelce was inundated with questions about Swift last week, and although he said he had heard some of her upcoming album — spoiler: he likes it — he did not offer any details about whether she would be at the game.
But she arrived at Allegiant Stadium on Sunday afternoon in time for the game. She walked the tunnels of the stadium wearing a black top and pants while carrying a red jacket over her shoulder — and wearing a custom diamond and gold necklace by Stephanie Gottlieb with Kelce’s No. 87 on it — and then headed up to the luxury suites.
The CBS broadcast did not show her much in a quiet first half for Kelce and Kansas City, but she was shown routinely as the team came back to win the game, with Kelce providing several key plays in the fourth quarter and overtime.
But wasn’t she in Tokyo … Saturday night?
She sure was. Her Eras Tour resumed recently, and on Saturday night in Tokyo, she performed yet another marathon set of her extensive catalog of songs. With flights from Tokyo to Las Vegas often taking 13 hours or more, and human beings requiring sleep, some worried she might not make the game.
The Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., pointed out that timing was not a real hurdle for Swift. First of all, a private jet shortens the journey (and provides a place to sleep peacefully if needed). Second of all, the international date line was her friend.
In 1873, before the international date line officially existed, author Jules Verne mapped out Swift’s time advantage in “Around the World in 80 Days.” In the book, the protagonist, Phileas Fogg, believes he has lost his bet only to realize the distance and direction of his travels had saved him:
In journeying eastward he had gone towards the sun, and the days therefore diminished for him as many times four minutes as he crossed degrees in this direction. There are three hundred and sixty degrees on the circumference of the earth; and these three hundred and sixty degrees, multiplied by four minutes, gives precisely twenty-four hours — that is, the day unconsciously gained. In other words, while Phileas Fogg, going eastward, saw the sun pass the meridian eighty times, his friends in London only saw it pass the meridian seventy-nine times. This is why they awaited him at the Reform Club on Saturday, and not Sunday, as Mr. Fogg thought.
For older generations, that helped explain the logistics of the international date line. For Generation Z and younger, their frame of reference will probably be … when Taylor Swift flew to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl.
Who did she sit with?
During the regular season, Swift attended numerous games in Kansas City while seated in a luxury suite controlled by Kelce’s close friend and longtime teammate, Patrick Mahomes. She appeared to become fast friends with Mahomes’ wife, Brittany, and was regularly seen with other members of the Mahomes family.
She has also spent time at games with Kelce’s parents, Donna and Ed, and her own father, mother and brother came with her to a game on Christmas. During Swift’s trip to New Jersey for a Chiefs-New York Jets game, she was seated with friends including actors Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively.
At a playoff game in Buffalo last month, she and Kylie Kelce were among those shown reacting to Jason Kelce’s shirtless bellowing and fraternizing with the crowd.
And at the AFC championship game in Baltimore, she was surrounded by Travis Kelce’s family and associates, including Donna and Ed Kelce, Jason and Kylie Kelce, and Kelce’s managers, Aaron and André Eanes. There were also a few of Swift’s friends, including actress Keleigh Teller and model Cara Delevingne.
For the Super Bowl, it was a similar crowd, with the Kelces, the Eanes brothers and Lively there with Swift and her family. Additions to the typical crew, in terms of whom she was shown with during the game, included rapper Ice Spice — who entered the stadium with Swift — and singer Lana Del Rey.
Why did this get so much attention?
No one ever seemed to mind Jack Nicholson being a fixture at Los Angeles Lakers games, or Spike Lee being more associated with the New York Knicks than most of the team’s players. Drake got only a slap on the wrist when he began walking onto the court during timeouts at Toronto Raptors playoff games. But even though Swift receives relatively little airtime during the broadcasts of Kansas City’s games, she has become a target for those who still think she’s getting outsize attention.
“The attention is there because the audience wants to see it,” Jason Kelce said in an interview during last week’s Pro Bowl festivities. “If people didn’t want to see it, they wouldn’t be showing it.”
As Swift put it, “a few dads, Brads and Chads” may be angry, but the TV networks are thrilled. A ratings analysis by The New York Times indicated that she very well may be a driving factor for the league’s increased audience. Chiefs coach Andy Reid has repeatedly said that he’s happy to have her around, and the NFL, which is enjoying an unexpected expansion of its built-in audience, has fully embraced her association with the league.
“NFL fans come in all types — even global sensations,” said Alex Riethmiller, an NFL spokesperson. “We’re glad to have Taylor on board.”