It’s been just about a year now that the Celebrity Coupling From Which There is No Escape began.
In fact, it was 51 weeks ago that I came upon the conspiracy theory that the whole thing was arranged prior to the Chiefs Week 4 game in New York, so that when you searched “taylor swift jets,” you got images of her in the owner’s box at MetLife, instead of articles about how the massive carbon footprint generated from her excessive private air travel was killing polar bears or something.
That was 12 long, painful, insufferable months ago.
Since then, this relationship has blocked the sun and left the rest of us norms shivering in the cold of the dark shadow it has cast.
They’ve been worse than ubiquitous. They’ve been living the best lives of anyone on the planet.
Everything Taylor and Travis Kelce have touched has turned to Unobtanium. They’ve put all us normies to shame. They haven’t made a mistake. Had a setback. Been anything other than perfectly perfect in a perfect way.
That is, until now:
@russillopod Todd McShay discusses Travis Kelce’s lack of production so far this season. #nfl #chiefs #kansascitychiefs #traviskelce #RussilloPod ♬ original sound – The Ryen Russillo Podcast
By now, every schoolkid knows Kelce’s numbers through three games. Eight catches for 69 yards and no touchdowns. Basically amounting to a good half for him in any of the previous 10 seasons.
There could be a whole host of reasons for this shocking drop off in production. Age perhaps. Andy Reid might be adjusting his scheme. Patrick Mahomes is blaming double teams. Which won’t cut it since it’s not like opposing coordinators are just now having this epiphany for the first time. It’s been tried before. And failed before.
No, most football fans with a sentient brain in their skulls have already connected the dots on what’s ailing Travis Kelce. And the lines form the outline of the most celebrated pop star in the English-speaking world. It’s just that no one in the media has been willing to admit what the rest of us are seeing. Until now. Until Todd McShay went there:
“So, I don’t understand this, and maybe it’s a political thing, maybe it’s like the NFL, and maybe I’m gonna wind up getting a phone call from the league office. Maybe it’s the Taylor Swift, I don’t know,” says McShay. …
“Every show I watch, every pregame show, halftime show, postgame show, weekday show, every broadcast I watch for the last few weeks, it’s like, are we not allowed to say that he’s out of shape? That he’s been partying all offseason? He’s been jet-setting around with the most famous person, probably in the entire world. That he’s drinking… going to the U.S. Open, he’s got cocktails in…”
“What I do know is: I want you to take a picture from preseason 2022 and then take a picture preseason 2024; they’re barely the same human being, Ryan,” added McShay. “And everyone’s like, ‘We gotta get him the ball. Why isn’t he part of the offense? The defense is double-covering (him).’ Here’s the thing, bottom line with Kelce, the coverage and the respect he gets is the same; the athlete is not.”
McShay’s lips to the football gods’ ears. Please, let this be so. Not just a slump. Not just running into a couple of good defensive game plans. Let this be the Shameless Attention Whore Lifestyle catching up with Kelce at last. If we’ve learned anything from celebrity documentaries, it’s that fame comes at a terrible price. In fact, that is the defining point of every, single one of those shows. It’s why the phrase, “But offstage, things were falling apart …” is a registered trademark of E! True Hollywood Story.
But through all of the 2023 NFL season and the 2024 offseason, Kelce has seemingly been immune from the natural laws of celebrity physics. Yet if McShay and our own eyes are correct, those immutable laws have caught up to him at last. And he’s finding out the hard way that you can’t live like a K-Pop star for 6 months of the year and expect to play NFL football the other six.
Of course, putting it in these terms is sort of taking the coward’s way out. This could all be very much about Taylor herself. She certainly wouldn’t be the first girlfriend who ruined a guy. We all know someone who started dating someone and it destroyed him. Some succubus who drained all the fun out of a man and made him a shell of his former self. But I won’t accuse her of that because I need to incur the wrath of the Swifties like I need to make enemies out of the Church of Scientology. Instead I’ll just keep drilling down on the idea she’s a wonderful, talented, successful woman, but her jet-setting lifestyle is simply too much for an NFL tight end to keep up with. I just hope this turns out to be the case.
