When the Baltimore Ravens host the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday, Taylor Swift will surely be in attendance and for the first time in my life, I am openly hoping for her unhappiness. Or, to be precise, I’m hoping for a situation that will cause Swift unhappiness: As a Ravens fan, I’m hoping the Chiefs get blown out.
Ever since Swift began dating the Chiefs’ star tight end Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs have become Taylor Swift’s team. She swallowed them right up. Chiefs signs have been replaced with Taylor Swift signs at games. And so the Ravens aren’t just playing against the Chiefs, they’re also playing against Taylor Swift. If you, like me, are pulling for the Ravens on Sunday, you know in the back of your head that you’re rooting against Taylor Swift.
Gone are the days when we just hope everybody has fun. This is the playoffs, the conference championship game—the winner goes to the Super Bowl. I hope Taylor Swift has fun in the first quarter, I hope she’s smiling for a drive or two. But I also hope that she’s sad when the camera shows her at the end. I hope Taylor Swift doesn’t go to the Super Bowl.
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And rest assured, the camera will show Swift at the end of the game. It will also show her during the first drive and just before halftime and throughout the broadcast. She’s on television whenever her boyfriend touches the football. It’s the laziest joke of the winter: that the NFL is exhausting us with Taylor Swift. In one game, the camera cut to Swift 17 different times. Even her boyfriend has said the league is “overdoing” the coverage.
The blame for this exhaustion is frequently placed on Swift herself, as if she’s simultaneously in the luxury box and the broadcast control room. Most of these complaints come grumbling from the mouths of, as Swift termed them, “dads, brads and chads.” I suppose these are men so bothered by the occasional sight of Taylor Swift on their television they feel the need to complain about it. It seems to me that the constant Swift cameos are only annoying when—and this does happen occasionally—instead of showing us a replay of a stunning catch or a big hit, the camera cuts to Swift.
But this inconvenience arises with any celebrity in the box, and celebrities are frequent guests at NFL games. The NFL likes to point them out—it’s good for business. And yet the camera only worships Taylor Swift. Why? Because Taylor Swift has transcended the label of celebrity. She’s looking fame in the rearview mirror.
Taylor Swift is the most famous person on our planet. She has an army behind her and they will watch NFL games just to catch a glimpse of her. Ryan Reynolds is only relevant at an NFL game because he’s standing in the luxury box beside Taylor Swift. A recent Vanity Fair headline declared “Winter Storm Awaits Taylor Swift if She Attends Kansas City Chiefs-Miami Dolphins Game.” Even the weather is only relevant in its relation to Taylor Swift.
Meanwhile, on TikTok, the NFL changed its bio to read “Taylor was here.” One NFL executive told The Athletic, “Anytime she was doing something, cheering for Travis, Travis was doing something and celebrating whatever that may have been, we knew we had to push that content very quickly.” Swift called her first NFL appearance a “hard launch” of her relationship. This is a relationship of “hard launches” and quickly pushed content.
It begins to feel like Taylor Swift isn’t dating Travis Kelce as much as she’s dating the National Football League. As though the two biggest cultural brands in America finally found each other. And the NFL wants Taylor in the Super Bowl. She brings viewers, millions of them. A Chief’s Super Bowl victory is in the NFL’s best interest. Can you imagine those optics? Taylor Swift finally climbs down from the bleachers and gets her happily-ever-after as her boyfriend proposes with the Super Bowl confetti falling. That’s the biggest cultural moment of the 21st century right there and the NFL owns it. Like actually, their contract says they own “any footage taken of events inside an NFL stadium.”
This is what I’m rooting against. I’m rooting against Taylor Swift’s happily-ever-after. Do you realize how daunting that is? I don’t know if Taylor Swift has true feelings for the Chiefs. Maybe she’s just supporting her boyfriend and she wants his team to win because she has feelings for him. But a single Taylor Swift feeling is a force of nature. It can set millions of dollars in motion, it can affect a political election. All the Ravens have is a reliable wide receiving corps, the best place-kicker in NFL history, a once-in-a-generation quarterback and a chip on their shoulder. What match is that for Taylor Swift?
You might be tempted to suggest I’m overblowing Swift’s power. But this is a game of inches, defined by stats. Travis Kelce plays noticeably better when Swift is there. The Chiefs are 8-3 this season with Swift in attendance. Without her, they’re 3-3. What I’m suggesting is that it’s more daunting to root against Taylor Swift than it is to root against the defending Super Bowl champions.
The glaring problem with rooting against Taylor Swift is that the people lining up against her so frequently go off the deep end. After she was on the cover of Time, one far-right pundit declared “the Taylor Swift girlboss psyop has been fully activated.” A Fox News host recently suggested that Swift is an asset of the “Pentagon’s psychological operations unit.”
And then, of course, there’s Kanye West. I don’t want to posit that Taylor Swift turned his brain to Nazi mush but Ye can’t even walk into a Skechers store anymore.
And furthermore, Taylor Swift means something to me, as she does to all millennials. I have a crystalized memory of being 17 years old, sitting on the bench seat of a Ford pick-up with a then-girlfriend, driving through sunset cornfields and singing a lyric that went our song is a slamming screen door. And I remember bouncing on the dancefloor of a fogged-up winter bar on my 22nd birthday, the whole place shaking and shouting along to a newly released song that went I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22. I mention these memories not because they’re unique to me, but because they’re not. And that makes it harder to root against Swift.
Not that I’m a true Swiftie. I sort of tuned out in the past few years when she attained god-status. I tend to get wary of anything inspiring widespread religious fervor. Of course, if you live on Earth, you can’t ever really tune Taylor Swift out of your life. But she came around infrequently—her face on billboards and her voice through the stereo systems in grocery store aisles. And now here she is again, and my football team is playing against her.
When she was rising into her current state-of-ubiquitousness, Swift was deliberately careful about choosing sides. But now she has a side—she’s a Chiefs fan. And now I have to root against Taylor Swift.
