How will we remember the 2023–24 NFL season? It’s possible that our primary association will be the Detroit Lions’ first-ever Super Bowl appearance (if they can beat the San Francisco 49ers next week), or the absence of Tom Brady for the first time in two decades, or the long-overdue banishment of Daniel Snyder. (All it took was $6 billion.) But I think it’s more likely that this will forever be known as the Season of Taylor Swift.
Whatever one’s thoughts about Swift — I’m personally in the camp of “the music is good and her concert movie was terrific and she’s a positive force in the universe but, uh, her fans are becoming increasingly terrifying,” but your mileage may vary — it’s undeniable that she has essentially taken over the NFL narrative. This is no small feat, to put it mildly. Over the past few years, the league has become the dominant American entertainment entity; I mean, it might have just killed the Emmys. But Swift, partly just through the mere fact of her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, but mostly through her ubiquitous appearances in various stadium skyboxes, cheering and dancing throughout Kelce’s games, has become as much a fixture of NFL television broadcasts as the players themselves. Sorry: It’s the Season of Swift. I don’t make the rules.
It is possible that this will all end on Sunday afternoon, when the Chiefs play the Baltimore Ravens for the AFC championship, with the Ravens 3.5-point favorites. If this is the end, I think the Season of Swift has left an indelible impression on the NFL and provides some concrete lessons we can take away about the league, its audience, and its influence moving forward. Here are six takeaways.
1. Swift has made an actual ratings impact, particularly among younger people.
Don’t think of the NFL as a sport, or even just as a mere entertainment product. Think of it as a global megacorporation, one that brought in $20 billion in revenue last year and is nearing commissioner Roger Goodell’s stated 2010 goal of $25 billion, which we all (myself very much included) mocked back then and now looks downright conservative. Anything that has grown that rapidly has to keep growing, and the best way to do that is to tap into fertile markets. One of the more concerning trends in sports over the last decade is how old the audience has gotten: The average NFL fan in 2020 was 50, which was younger than Major League Baseball (57) but older than the NBA (42) and soccer (39). But that age has been falling over the last three years, thanks to a coordinated campaign from the NFL, including “enhanced” broadcasts on Nickelodeon. There are signs that Swift’s presence may have hastened the trend this year. The Chiefs’ divisional playoff game against the Miami Dolphins, which streamed exclusively on Peacock, saw a massive ratings boost among viewers 18 to 34, up nearly 67 percent from last year’s comparable Saturday-night divisional playoff game, despite being shown exclusively on a streaming network that required a unique subscription. Forty-five percent of viewers were 49 or under, up 10 percentage points from last year, and by far the lowest average age of any other playoff game that weekend. (Ratings analysts account for your parents not necessarily being able to figure out streaming.) Put it this way: There weren’t a lot of paparazzi at the Texans-Browns game. It may have annoyed hard-core NFL fans that networks kept cutting away to Swift’s booth after big plays. But your kids? Your kids probably loved it. Speaking of which …
2. Those luxury-box cutaway shots are here to stay.
Do you remember what initially launched the Kelce brothers into the world of celebrity, a world they’d have to inhabit for Swift to notice Travis at all? It was the Super Bowl last year, which featured regular cutaways to Goodell’s booth, where he was sitting with then-still-recovering Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin and Donna Kelce, the mother of Travis and Jason. With her two sons on opposing teams in the big game, she wore a custom Chiefs/Eagles jersey. It was a huge hit — it’s why you saw Donna herself in multiple advertising campaigns this year — and has been replicated across broadcasts all season. But Swift, as she tends to do, has turned self-promotion into its own form of art, including using her luxury box in Buffalo (a city she hasn’t played a show in since 2011) as essentially an expensive Instagram booth. There was swag surfing, there was cursing, there was even a shirtless potential brother-in-law:
You know how it used to be as big a deal that Jack Nicholson was at a Lakers game as it was that the Lakers were playing? The NFL is about to host its own Celebrity Row during every big game. Sitting in seats the rest of us schmucks could never dream of affording, obviously — that’s a big part of the appeal.
3. The NFL no longer thinks off-field stories are a “distraction.”
By listening to the increasingly Ed Grimley–esque Tony Romo call playoff games for CBS, you would be hard-pressed to remember that this guy once dated the biggest (very briefly, anyway) pop star in the world. But it’s worth recalling that when Romo and Jessica Simpson were an item, and Romo was the starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, the NFL treated the story as if it were some sort of ugly off-field scandal it wanted everyone to ignore. Troy Aikman said at the time that Romo had to “choose between being a quarterback or a celebrity,” and you never, ever heard Simpson even mentioned on telecasts, let alone shown. But now, Swift cutaways are as common as sideline shots, and announcers are encouraged to discuss her and Kelce’s relationship openly, even as part of the pregame promos. The NFL, as it has continued to grow, has moved further away from the hard-core frozen tundra of Lambeau Field tough-guy model for itself and more toward an inclusive, casual-friend-friendly approach, assuming (correctly) that the hard-core diehards are going to watch anyway. The embrace of Swift and Kelce is another sign that the league wants to be a full four-quadrants entertainment product.
4. We media folk have actually all been pretty cool about the Swift-Kelce thing.
I mentioned this last week, but it bears repeating: The Constant Hot Take Machine that is the industrial NFL-discussion complex has been remarkably sane about the Swift-Kelce relationship. After all — and forgive me as I quote myself:
Kelce is actually having the worst year of his career, on a team that has felt like a slight bit of a disappointment in its quest to defend its Super Bowl title. The great ESPN writer Seth Wickersham wrote a big piece about Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in which multiple observers at least obliquely place some of the blame for the Chiefs’ underwhelming season on the Swift–Kelce circus. And yet you still haven’t seen much general blowback.
This very clearly would not have been the reaction at any other time in NFL history. Not with Romo, not with Tom Brady when he was going through his Bridget Moynahan mess, and, going way back, not even with Joe Namath during his decade of tomcatting. This relationship has been treated almost … respectfully? I’d like to say this is because most sportswriters and talking heads have gotten a better perspective on players’ lives and privacy off the field. The more depressing read is that there are just a lot fewer sportswriters and talking heads than there once were.
5. This is the last season the NFL can stay out of the culture wars.
If you’re a normal person who enjoys sunshine and fresh air, you might not know that Swift has long been loathed by a certain subsection of online conservatives. (I’m not entirely sure why, and I value the finite time I have on this earth too much to dig all that deeply into it.) I do know that the loathing was exacerbated by Swift’s relationship with Kelce, who took heat from Aaron Rodgers for the crime of encouraging football fans to get a free, lifesaving vaccine. Politics-driven anti-Swift sentiment hasn’t much crossed over into the mainstream audience, largely because the average American
(for better or worse) closed their ears to politics (or “politics”) in 2023 and just tried to enjoy casual pleasures like, say, pro football. But we’re now in an election year, which will be impossible for anyone to ignore, even the NFL. The Super Bowl, on February 11, will be the final game until September. Suffice it to say, we’re all going to be a lot less chill about politics by that point. The NFL needs to enjoy this respite while it can. Put it this way: I bet Swift skips the first few games of the year this fall.
6. A Vegas-Swift-Chiefs Super Bowl is the NFL’s dream.
If the Ravens beat the Chiefs, they will be a worthy Super Bowl competitor: A terrific team with an electric quarterback having a career year. But let’s not kid ourselves: The NFL wants Taylor Swift in that skybox in Las Vegas on February 11. It actually wants her in town all week: Maybe she’ll pop by and see U2 at the Sphere. As long as this year is a success, you should expect to see the Super Bowl in Vegas every three or four Februaries. Swift’s presence could really help. It’ll be like having an extra celebrity for the halftime show; you’ll get more cutaways to her than to Usher, that’s for sure.
This has been the year the NFL consolidated nearly every aspect of American pop culture under its tent, and trotting out Swift at its biggest event would be the perfect way to end this season, even if league executives wouldn’t quite put it that way. I bet she even does a pregame interview … and it outrates Joe Biden’s.
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