This isn’t normally where you come for celebrity news and my only true brush with fame was the time I snuck covertly into the Sirius XM tent at Super Bowl LII to snap a photo with my hero, Guy Fieri. But there is something relevant from a football perspective that deserves mentioning upon the news that Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are engaged.
It’s fine—healthy even!—if you don’t care but the reality of the situation is that one of the most famous people in the world has willingly agreed to marry the tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs. Not the head coach. Not the quarterback. Not the owner. Not the CEO of the private equity firm that is about to buy 10% and require that all Chiefs players bring their own tupperware to work. The guy whose position is probably more of an international punchline (what’s a tight end, you say?) than it is a globally understood part of football vernacular.
If this is not a reflection of the growing reach and impending dominance of the NFL, I’m not sure what is. We can roll our eyes when commissioner Roger Goodell says he doesn’t view Major League Baseball or the National Basketball Association as competitors, but instead Apple or Amazon. That is until now, when a young Taylor Swift fan in Sri Lanka will be able to tell you who the Chiefs drafted in the third round of the 2013 draft (the Chiefs selected at pick No. 63 again this year by the way, and took Omarr Norman-Lott from Tennessee, who, as best I can tell, is not yet connected to Oprah or Tim Cook in any meaningful way). Having Swift at NFL games applauding Kelce from a private suite was one thing. Cementing an engagement and, perhaps, silencing those who dismissed this pairing as a media creation of mutual benefit while locking in one of the biggest global superstars as a permanent guest in your universe, is quite another.
GALLERY: Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift Engaged
Kelce is the perfect example of a football creation; someone with personality who swam through the NFL content stream and found himself on the other side. Beyond even Peyton Manning, whose every commercial needs to remind you that he once played quarterback and has a large forehead. Or Tom Brady, whose every appearance in media needs to tirelessly rehash his fairy tale of determination. Kelce is talking about real Hollywood gigs. Real TV spots. Real post-career prospects toward a life where we may forget what he did for work in the first place. A crossover a la Dwayne Johnson or, yes, O.J. Simpson prior to the latter stages of his life. Kelce hosts a podcast with his brother, a former sixth-round pick center, and used that startlingly gigantic platform to profess his love for Swift in the first place, starting a relationship in earnest.
Travis and Jason are future Hall of Famers and may respectively end their careers as the greatest, or one of the greatest, at their respective positions. That should never be downplayed. But the fact that two kids from just south of Lake Erie found a stage big enough to lure a transcendent pop star into marrying one of them is still incredibly, unbelievably wild when you lay it out that way.
For years we’ve heard that NFL players will always have a lower Q-rating than international soccer stars, Formula One drivers or other global niche celebrities who enjoy a sport with more relevance around the world and, unlike NFL players, aren’t constantly cloaked by a helmet obscuring their faces. Kelce and Swift’s romance plows through conventions, just like it would if she found love in the Professional Bowlers Association or Power Slap.
What the NFL’s long-term plans are in terms of capitalization remain to be seen. The roster of marketable content associated with the sport is already so deep that its tentpole features—Hard Knocks, for example—are already so blatantly plagiarized and homogenized by other sports and pop culture entities that it borders on absurdity.
And yet, the league’s efforts of truly and unmistakably crossing that barrier from sports relevance into true global relevance has always come with a bit of a cringe prior to the Kelce-Swift monolith. Major Hollywood feature films like Draft Day, NFL appearances at the Met Gala or having one of its Pro Bowlers command a regular audience with Warren Buffett were all a bit like the league standing on someone’s shoulders, donning a trench coat and trying to sneak its way into the adult party. NFL players were ultimately, like they were in high school, at a desirable lunch table but not necessarily the lunch table.
This week has changed that, offering the league a permanent gold card applicable at any location, anywhere. We inside the circle may not truly understand since football has been the totality of our universe for decades now—but life is changing. The NFL is growing larger in ways we cannot really understand, like the expansion of a black hole in outer space. In that way, it is less interesting to wonder what the NFL will do next on the Kelce-Swift front, but to ask ourselves what else is possible now that the league is big and powerful enough to support the eventual rise of another just like him and has dibs on the formula.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Travis Kelce’s Engagement to Taylor Swift Benefits the NFL and Its Players.