Taylor Swift Has a Message for the Dads, Brads and Chads Who Love NFL Football

TIME had the audacity, the sheer unmitigated gall to announce their 2023 Person of the Year a few short hours before we posted our Sports Media Awards but there's plenty of click juice to go around to keep us all fat and giggly. Their announcement came with what amounts to a very good and unusually open interview with Taylor Swift, where her relationship with Travis Kelce obviously came up. And how she's assimilating to her new role as lingering storyline for the most popular sport in America. A sport she apparently did not have much history with before beginning a courtship with one of its premier players.

“Football is awesome, it turns out,” Swift says playfully. “I’ve been missing out my whole life.”

Swift is 33 years-old. She was born just a few months before the Joe Montana-led San Francisco 49ers destroyed the Denver Broncos, 55-10, in Super Bowl XXIV. Just think of how much great football she missed between then and Week 1 of this year. One has to think she's deep into a YouTube, staying up until all hours of the night to familiarize herself with Buddy Ryan's defense and Dante Hall's punt returns.

Most germane to the sports media world is the section where she discusses the copious cutaway shots networks feel compelled to show while she's in attendance. She makes it clear that her and her team have nothing to do with that.

“I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in,” she says. “There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when then camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once.” She is sensitive to the attention that’s put on her when she shows up. “I’m just there to support Travis,” she says. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”

Excellent quote. No notes. Dads, Brads, and Chads sounds like an amazing name for parenting blog that occasionally touches on the 2000 Presidential election. And an accurate snapshot of the stereotypical football fan. I think you could legally classify a group of people at Buffalo Wild Wings on fall Sundays as D's, B's, and C's.

To answer her question, though, television people know what suite she's in because it's their job to know. Think of how weird it'd be if Jim Nantz informed America that Swift was there but they couldn't find her. People would be freaking out even more than they do when she puts a little heart emoji on a picture of a cat or whatever her superfans freak out about (everything?).