The Season Finale of the Taylor-Travis Romance is Sunday Night
Hung Up x Impersonal Foul x The Super Bowl
Good evening Traitors! A convo about the Peacock reality show — Survivor meets F-Boy Island — will be live shortly in the Hung Up chat. There will be a Super Bowl chat on Sunday too!
Last Sunday Taylor Swift won the Grammy for album of the year; this Sunday Travis Kelce will (probably? I mean, very likely?) win the Super Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs face the San Francisco 49ers in Las Vegas, and I’m Jimmy Butler hanging his head. It’s not personal. I am tired of it all: the cutting away to Taylor Swift during football games, the backlash to cutting away to Taylor Swift during football games, the backlash to the backlash regarding the cutting away to Taylor Swift during football games. Give me one good reason why I should know who Brittany Mahomes is. That was a trap. You can’t!
Madeline Hill, the brains behind the sports gossip newsletter
, and I convened in Google doc to talk through Travis and Taylor, a Grammys stage divided (Lana del Rey is a 49ers fan), and whether Selena Gomez will attend the game.Hunter Harris: Ten days ago when I was in Tulsa, I watched football with my great Uncle, who I just call “Uncle.” When Travis Kelce came onscreen, Uncle said “Evidently that one is dating some sort of country singer.” (I cannot stress enough he is 86 years old.) Uncle asked me if I knew anything about that, and the last thing I remember is saying “Yeah, she’s more of a pop singer now, and she’s considered the greatest songwriter of her generation, perhaps…” before I started fully rambling, and saw his eyes flutter as he dozed off.
Anyway.
The Super Bowl is this Sunday. I’m calling this the season finale of the whirlwind Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance — it will be renewed immediately for another six seasons and movie, but we’ll get a little bit of a break. I’ve had enough of it! I don’t even hate their whole thing, it’s just too much. Tree Paine should know better.
Madeline, how are you feeling about Sunday’s game?
Madeline Hill: Had enough?! I may be over seeing Jason Kelce’s shirtless bod jump into the stands at games, but I am certainly not over seeing how much more vintage Chiefs gear Ms. Swift’s stylist can source on Ebay or Etsy (most likely the latter)....
The Chiefs are playing the San Francisco 49ers and both teams have already played in the Super Bowl before—and won. From an actual sports standpoint, I don’t think anyone is *that* excited to see both of these teams back in the game…
The Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship, who arguably were a better team, but just could not seal the deal. The 49ers beat the Detroit Lions in the AFC Championship and they were winning—until they weren’t. We! Were! All! Rooting! For! You!
Curious how Eminem is handling the loss…
From a sports gossip standpoint, there has maybe never been a Super Bowl with this much chatter since….we all know what happened in 2004….Justice for Janet!
HH: But is that just because of the Taylor Swift effect? Or is there a real rivalry between the Chiefs and the 49ers?
Sidenote: I saw that Lana Del Rey is (randomly?) a 49ers supporter. Women who sing about snow on the beach being weird but fucking beautiful should not fight. And a devastating piece of information I gleaned from Googling “celebrity 49ers fans” just now:
MH: Girl, no. There is no rivalry. The Chiefs' main rivalries are teams like the Oakland Raiders (now based in Las Vegas), The Buffalo Bills, and the Green Bay Packers. The Chiefs do not care about VC firms, DTC brands, or Patagonia vests!
That’s also what makes this Super Bowl from a purely football perspective…not that exciting? Please don’t come for me actual football experts, but there isn’t a lot of on-the-field drama that has been brewing between them. That’s why the off-the-field content is so much more interesting this year for sports gossip fans and NFL script writers alike. The Taylor Swift effect is very real.
Obviously, one of the most talked about aspects is the friendship forming between Taylor Swift and Brittany Mahomes, the wife of the Chiefs quarterback, Patrick Mahomes. Ms. Swift has been dragging Brittany around like she’s taking her on a class field trip, but instead of going to the Natural History Museum, they’re going to Casa Cipriani.
What are your thoughts on this friendship?
HH: What’s the opposite of ‘benefitted from?’ No one in the entire Chiefs organization, and maybe the entire NFL, has benefited less from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce than Brittany Mahomes.1 I saw a TikTok (that I unfortunately can’t find right now, otherwise I’d link) about how Vogue cropped Brittany Mahomes out of a Taylor Swift dinner pap shot. Girl: every outlet crops Brittany Mahomes out of every Taylor Swift photo.
Brittany Mahomes seems to be widely disliked in Kansas City, according to everyone from Kansas City I’ve ever met. It’s hard to pinpoint why exactly she elicits so much ire, other than her obnoxiously gaudy-new money persona. The Taylor Swift friendship seems precariously temporary (although they do dress equally bad, just in opposite ways), and has only heightened her profile to the degree more people are off-put by her. I’ll present this without comment: the way she says “𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑛” in this video.
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(Patrick Mahomes’ dejected correction (“Mexican food”) also sends me.)
I know I never shut up about how much I love Gossip Time, Allie Jones’s newsletter, but her recent post about who is likely to be in Taylor Swift’s VIP suite is really something special. Who do you think we can expect to see at the game?
MH: And we can’t forget the fact that Brittany Mahomes used appear in cringe-inducing TikToks at games with Patrick’s younger brother Jackson, who was once accused of sexual assault...I’ll save *that* topic for another day.
I do agree with Jones that we’ll likely see some familiar faces…I’m guessing at least one Haim sister, Blake Lively and that husband of hers who likes to post funny tweets for sure, and maybe we’ll get an OG Swift friend like Selena Gomez or that redhead Abigail??? As a natural redhead, I’m biased and would rather see Abigail there than Selena…
We all know one thing is for sure: Cara Delevingne will be there for some reason!
I’ll end with this: I just hope that Swift continues to bring these ladies to these games solely for the fact that I would love to see a Haim sister date a random Chiefs player. Like a kicker or something like that, because a lot of games do tend to come down to….The Wire.
You can read more of Madeline’s work on Impersonal Foul here.
Mahomes did get a well-timed but unfortunately-styled Sports Illustrated shoot, however.
Uncle IS the moment.
Im sure most Kansas City fans not liking Brittney Mahomes is steeped in misogyny and them perceiving her as unattractive and therefore not deserving of their quarterback. (which would then lead me into a whole tangent on the homoerotic para-social relationship most of these fans have with their favorite athletes.) But something about her is a little..off putting? You can tell she wants "it" without having "it" and playing lapdog in fleeting relationship with Swift is proof of that.