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It could go down as the greatest NFL love stories ever told, and it’s changing the way writers cover the Kansas City Chiefs.
Before word travelled of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce being an item, there were plenty of compelling stories and angles regarding this team.
After all, they entered the 2023 regular season as reigning Super Bowl champions, with a trio of future Hall of Famers in coach Andy Reid, QB1 Patrick Mahomes and Kelce.
Those three alone got the bulk of the attention from local journalists in the past until a certain Grammy Award-winning pop singer decided to make regular appearances at Chief games.
While long-time writers and reporters have lots of Chiefs content to share, the ongoing story all season is the romance between Swift and Kelce.
The Swift Effect
Pete Sweeney is the editor-in-chief of Arrowhead Pride, a website dedicated to Kansas City Chief supporters.
In a recent piece with Vanity Fair, he and other Chief columnists discussed how they had to change their team coverage with more of a focus on the music star.
Sweeney says traditionally, he makes it a policy to “not really talk about the family members and personal lives of the players.”
That all changed when speculation rose that Swift would attend the Chiefs September game against the Chicago Bears.
Sweeney published a short piece about the reported budding romance between Swift and Kelce, and traffic per Google algorithms soared tremendously.
He says at that stage, “I realized we had to at least cover this to a certain point.”
Swift’s been spotted in numerous home and away games for the Chiefs this season.
Sweeney is far from the only writer discovering the benefits of the Swift/Kelce romance, though.
Jesse Newell, a beat writer for the Kansas City Star, says, “We feel like the whole nation watches football. But you bring Taylor Swift into this thing, and you realize, Wow, she’s bigger. She’s way bigger.”
Neal Jones covers the Chiefs as a local sports anchor for KCTV and says these days when people stop to talk to him, the topic of Swift and Kelce comes up often.
“I get more questions about Taylor Swift than I do about the Chiefs offense,” Jones says.
Embracing Swift and Kelce Mania
As you can imagine, getting sports journalists on board to cover Swift and Kelce in more depth didn’t come easy.
Just like power couples of the past from Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson, they usually reserve those stories for entertainment and gossip columnists.
Jones admits that his KCTV producers slowly embraced the Kelce/Swift romance.
Now, though, he says it’s “brought eyeballs to our broadcast that would never be there because we’re talking about Taylor Swift.”
That’s the kind of impact Swift can make.
For better or worse, some of the biggest personalities in sports and entertainment are talking about Taylor Swift and, with that, the Chiefs.
Skip Bayless has tweeted that she’s been a distraction, Tony Gonzalez has talked about it being a good thing for the team and the NFL.
No matter what your sentiments are, Taylor Swift and her presence at NFL games has changed the way we cover the team this season.