Kansas City has lost five of its last eight games and three of its last four.
The Kansas City Chiefs are having a disappointing second half of the season. After a dazzling start, in which they accumulated six wins and only one loss, the team has been in trouble, and some analysts believe they have found the cause: Taylor Swift.
Specialists such as OutKick’s Armando Salguero and Clay Travis, and Fox Sports 1’s Skip Bayless and Craig Carton have not hesitated to point to the pop sensation as the biggest distraction currently facing head coach Andy Reid’s pupils.
Since the “Bad Blood” singer began her well-known romance with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, she has attended eight of the team’s games, where she has become the center of attention, even above what’s going on on the gridiron.
Television cameras and cell phones capture Swift’s every gesture and movement in the boxes and follow every step she and Kelce take outside the stadium.
Taylor’s most recent visit to a stadium resulted in a 20-14 Chiefs loss to the Las Vegas Raiders, a supposedly “easy” opponent for the defending NFL champion. The defeat unleashed the anger of fans and criticism from analysts.
What do the pundits say?
After the setback, Salguero was quick to point out in an article for OutKick: “The Kansas City Chiefs were a big disappointment on Christmas afternoon – to the degree one has to wonder if they have any chance in the upcoming playoffs.”
The analyst pointed the finger directly at Reid, Kelce, and quarterback Patrick Mahomes. Regarding Travis and Taylor’s relationship, he recalled that the tight end has made long trips to be present at his girlfriend’s concerts, including one in Argentina during the team’s bye week.
However, he also acknowledged that Reid and Mahomes have had their own set of distractions, in the form of multiple appearances in all kinds of commercials. Although those were filmed months ago, these footages continue to be a distraction.
Bayless, for his part, was more direct, saying, “Feels like it’s about time to call Taylor Swift a distraction. What do you think, Patrick? Andy? How about you, Travis?”
Clay Travis was more scathing and even compared Swift to Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, and criticized Kelce’s promotion of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer.
“The Chiefs are not a good football team, and Travis Kelce looks like he should retire. He’s been worthless the last seven or eight weeks. The double worthless Pfizer shots may have caught up with him. Either that or Taylor Swift is the Chief’s Yoko Ono. Maybe both,” he said in a post on X.
“Kelce is not the Kelce he’s been for the last 20 years of his career, and I’m not sure if it’s because he’s distracted by the off-the-field stuff, which is very public, or for a guy in his mid-30s, who has talked about ‘my body doesn’t want to take any more’ that maybe the mind has followed,” said Carton, for his part.
How true can it be?
While there’s no denying the attention Swift attracts during games, Kansas City is 5-3 when she attends the stadium, including a 4-0 run in her first few games.
That Kelce is distracted by his whirlwind relationship with the performer is also possible. However, it is worth remembering that the tight end has 90 receptions so far this season and, with two games left, could very well break the 100-catch mark for the third time in his 11-year career.
On the other hand, the Chiefs’ problems are not in Kelce’s hands or Mahomes’ arm, they are mostly in the receiving corps.
Until December 26, when they lost 27-19 to the Green Bay Packers, Kansas City receivers had dropped 8% of Mahomes’ passes, meaning they had dropped 37 of 454 passes. The highest rate among the rest of the NFL teams is 5%.
Whether in the end, it turns out to be true that Taylor Swift was the cause or the pointing fingers find a new culprit, the Chiefs’ future hangs in the balance, and with it, that of Reid, Mahomes, and Kelce, regardless of whether it is fair or not.