Stop trying to fight it. The next two weeks are going to be about the three teams playing in the Feb. 11 Super Bowl: the San Francisco 49ers, the Kansas City Chiefs and upstarts TNT (Travis N’ Taylor). Even typically unflappable KC coach Andy Reid couldn’t avoid getting roped into the romance that ate the NFL.
In fact, Reid popped into this week’s episode’s Let’s Go with Tom Brady, Larry Fitzgerald and Jim Gray podcast to discuss his team’s dominating victory in the AFC Championship game on Sunday, the endless pics of his signature horseshoe mustache freezing during the Miami game two weeks ago and the excellent play of QB Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce this weeked.
Oh, he also dropped the one Taylor Swift-related story no one has heard yet.
Asked what it’s like to be the “Beatles” — with so much attention on the team thanks to Swift’s romance with Kelce and the deluge of press scrambling to chronicle their every kiss and whispered sweet nothing — Reid said simply, “she’s been great.” In fact, in a story sure to result in some locker room ribbing for Kelce, Reid revealed that he actually knew the pop star before Travis did.
“I knew her before, from Philadelphia. Her dad [Scott Swift] played at [University of] Delaware and was a big football fan and good guy,” Reid said. “So I had met him there and her. So that was the last thing Trav wanted to hear, that I knew her before him. She told him, ‘I know your coach,’” Reid recalled. And he went, ‘Oh, God, come on!’”
All jokes aside, Reid said Swift is a “good girl and I’m happy for Trav,” while assuring fans of the team headed to their fourth Super Bowl in five years, “there’s been no distraction at all. Travis handled it right, she’s handled it right and we just move forward.”
While the rest of the world is tying itself in knots trying to figure out how, or if, Swift will be able to jet from her show in at the Tokyo Dome in Japan on Feb. 10 to Las Vegas in time for the 6:30 p.m. ET kick-off of Super Bowl LVIII at Allegiant Stadium, three-time Super Bowl champ Reid, as usual, is firmly focused on the X’s and O’s.
“Maybe you’re not the most talented. Maybe you’re not the fastest or the quickest or whatever,” he said in a press conference on Monday. “But let’s go maximize what we are and let the chips fall where they may.”
Super Bowl LVII will air on CBS and Nickelodeon and stream on Paramount+, with Usher performing the halftime show.
Listen to the episode below — Taylor talk begins at 24:30 mark.