by The Kansas City Chiefs won their third Super Bowl title in the last five seasons by beating the San Francisco 49ers in overtime, 25-22, on Sunday. While some NFL players go their entire careers without winning a championship, one of Kansas City’s newcomers emerged victorious in his 13th game.
Taylor Swift, who has been dating Kansas City star tight end Travis Kelce, changed the conversation about the NFL all season, attracting a new audience to the league and inspiring strong emotions (both positive and negative) among fans. . And, as expected, she was in the stadium and cheering on Mr. Kelce and the Chiefs in their comeback victory.
After the game, Mrs. Swift celebrated in the field with Donna Kelce and the rest of the Kansas City friends and family as Mr. Kelce sang a truly memorable performance of “Viva Las Vegas”.
He then found Mr. Kelce to celebrate after his speech.
“It was amazing,” she told him in a video recorded on the field after the game. “It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever experienced.”
After the game Mr. Kelce was asked if any couple had a better week than Ms. Swift winning two Grammy Awards and Mr. Kelce. winning the super bowl.
“On top of the world right now, baby,” he said. “It’s a good feeling.”
Was there any doubt that she would go?
Mrs. 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 to find out what she is doing. Before a Kansas City game in October, for example, an NBC producer said she had a spotter plane scanning 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 while he said he’d heard some of her upcoming album (spoiler: he likes it), he didn’t offer any details about whether she’d be at the game.
But he arrived at Allegiant Stadium on Sunday afternoon in time for the game. He walked through the stadium tunnels wearing a black top and pants while carrying a red jacket over her shoulder and wearing a custom Stephanie Gottlieb gold and diamond necklace with Mr. Kelce’s number 87, and then headed to the luxury suites.
The CBS broadcast didn’t show it much in a quiet first half for Kelce and Kansas City, but it was routinely shown 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… last night?
She sure was. Her Eras de ella tour recently resumed and on Saturday night in Tokyo she performed another marathon set of her extensive song catalogue. Since flights from Tokyo to Las Vegas often last 13 hours or more and humans need sleep, some feared she would not be able to attend the game.
The Japanese embassy in Washington he pointed that moment was no real obstacle for Ms. Swift. First, a private jet shortens the trip (and provides a place to sleep peacefully if necessary). Secondly, the international date line was her friend.
In 1873, before the international date line officially existed, author Jules Verne charted Ms. Swift’s time advantage in “Around the World in 80 Days.” In the book, the protagonist Phileas Fogg believes he has lost his bet, but realizes that the distance and direction of his travel had saved him:
When traveling eastward, he had gone towards the sun, and that is why the days decreased for him as many times as four minutes as he advanced degrees in that direction. There are three hundred and sixty degrees in the circumference of the earth; and these three hundred and sixty degrees, multiplied by four minutes, give exactly twenty-four hours, that is, the day gained unconsciously. In other words, as Phileas Fogg, going east, watched the sun pass the meridian eighty Sometimes his friends in London only saw him pass the meridian Seventy-nine times. That’s why they expected him at the Reform Club on Saturday and not on Sunday, as Mr. Fogg thought.
Or, as “The West Wing” is more succinctly summarized in a scene analyzing President Bartlett’s trip from Tokyo to Washington, D.C. (and which recently went viral online):
Josh: Will you land in Washington an hour before taking off?
Sam: Yeah.
For older generations, those scenes helped explain the logistics of the international date line. For Gen Z and younger people, their frame of reference will probably be… when Taylor Swift flew to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl.
During the regular season, Ms. Swift attended numerous games in Kansas City while sitting in a luxury suite controlled by Mr. Kelce’s close friend and longtime teammate, Patrick Mahomes. She appeared to become fast friends with Mr. Mahomes’ wife, Brittany, and was regularly seen with other members of the Mahomes family.
She also spent time at games with Mr. Kelce’s parents, Donna and Ed, and her own father, mother and brother accompanied her to a game at Christmas. During Ms. Swift’s trip to New Jersey for a Chiefs-Jets game, she sat with friends including actors Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively.
At a playoff game in Buffalo last month, she and Kylie Kelce were among those who reacted to Jason Kelce’s shirtless yelling and fraternized with the crowd.
And at the AFC championship game in Baltimore, she was surrounded by Mr. Kelce’s family and associates, including Donna and Ed Kelce, Jason and Kylie Kelce and Mr. Kelce’s managers, Aaron and André Eanes. Some of Swift’s friends were also there, such as actress Keleigh Teller and model Cara Delevingne.
For the Super Bowl, there was a similar crowd, with the Kelces, the Eanes brothers and Lively there with Swift and her family. Additions to the typical team, in terms of who she showed off during the game, included rapper Ice Spice, who entered the stadium with Ms. Swift, and singer Lana Del Rey.
Why did this get so much attention?
No one seemed to care that Jack Nicholson was an accessory at Los Angeles Lakers games, or Spike Lee being Most associated with the New York Knicks than most of the players on the team. Drake only got a slap on the wrist when he started walking onto the court during timeouts in Toronto Raptors playoff games. But even though Swift receives relatively little airtime during broadcasts of Kansas City games, he has become a target of those who still think he is receiving outsized attention.
“The attention is there because the public wants to see it,” Jason Kelce, Travis’ brother, said in an interview during last week’s Pro Bowl festivities. “If people didn’t want to see it, they wouldn’t show it.”
As Ms. Swift put it., “some dads, Brads and Chads” may be angry, but the television networks are delighted. A ratings analysis by The Upshot indicated that she may very well be a driving factor in the league’s viewership growth. Chiefs coach Andy Reid has repeatedly said 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 from all walks of life, including global sensations,” said NFL spokesman Alex Riethmiller. “We’re happy to have Taylor on board.”
This is Taylor, surely there was some numerology involved?
Ms Swift has said she loves the number 13 and her fans can seemingly find it everywhere. In the case of this year’s Super Bowl, examples abound:
Super Bowl 58 (5+8=13)
February 11, 2/11 (2+11=13)
Kansas City plays against the 49ers (4+9=13)
The 49ers were the No. 1 seed in the NFC, while the Chiefs were the No. 3 seed in the AFC (1 and 3 – 13)
It wasn’t clear at the start of the day whether it was a good or bad sign for San Francisco’s starting quarterback, Brock Purdy, to wear No. 13. But in the end that didn’t matter, as the 13th game of the season of the Swift’s NFL ended with a Chiefs victory.
