Kevin Van Valkenburg, editorial director of golf media company No Laying Up, covered the NFL for ESPN for 11 years, but for his 14-year-old daughter, Molly, football “just never resonated until the Taylor stuff,” he tells me. The Swift/NFL mashup has inspired an ongoing dialogue between the two, including 20 minutes analyzing Swift’s cheeky lyric change for Kelce in Buenos Aires: “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs/coming straight home to me.”
“I like being a girl dad a lot,” Van Valkenburg says, “and I like talking to them about stuff that’s a crossover between our worlds.”
My own Chiefs fandom does not discount valid criticism of the NFL and its treatment of domestic abuse and racial and social justice and CTEs, to cite just a few issues. Unfortunately, there are few American institutions that aren’t rotten with patriarchy, including Hollywood and the U.S. government, but I still watch movies and participate in elections. And in this context especially, I believe new-to-the-NFL Swifties are a force of overwhelming good, even a promise of evolution. We’re a new swath of advertising eyeballs, merch consumers, and ticket buyers, not to mention unflappable dedication, attention to detail, and deftly produced montages marking what may be Jason Kelce’s final NFL game.
“Does the NFL welcome new fans, particularly fans who come from demographics they have not been historically successful in courting? Absolutely,” Nora Princiotti, who covers the NFL for The Ringer and Swift on the podcast Every Album, tells Vogue. “They’re doing cartwheels.”
There are nevertheless loud, male voices bristling at Swift’s very presence, branding her a Siren-like “distraction” and complaining about frequent cutaways to her on game days (blame the evil marketing geniuses at the networks). “That’s the thing that’s disenchanting people with sports now,” former Colts coach turned commentator Tony Dungy recently opined when asked about the so-called “Swift Effect.”“There’s so much on the outside coming in. Entertainment value and different things. Taking away from what really happens on the field.” As if entertainment value—sometimes to barbaric effect—hasn’t always been synonymous with the game.
The misogyny of blaming wives and girlfriends for players’ foibles is evidently still happening too, with members of the NFL media maligning Swift, like Jessica Simpson and Gisele Bündchen before her, for Kelce’s and the Chiefs’ struggles. (Still, they managed to win their division and advance to the second round of the playoffs.) On X, ESPN’s Mike Greenberg floated “all the Taylor stuff” as a possible explanation for the Chiefs’ close game (which they ultimately won) against the lowly New York Jets in October. Former senior Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted a joke that failed to land following a loss to the Las Vegas Raiders on Christmas Day: “At some point it has to be asked: is Taylor Swift killing the Chiefs?” And after the Chiefs’ latest game against the Miami Dolphins, an NFL draft analyst pointedly noted that Kelce, who dropped three passes, had done so “in only one game his entire career prior to dating Taylor Swift.” Others have predictably invoked Yoko Ono and claimed that Swift has “ruined the NFL.”