Well, the Kansas City Chiefs are headed back to the Super Bowl. Like most NFL fans, I was hoping for a Baltimore Ravens/Detroit Lions matchup this year. The Ravens because it’s about time Lamar Jackson got his due and the Lions because they’re such a great Cinderella story under their gritty new head coach, Dan Campbell.
Instead, we’ve got the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, same as it was four Super Bowls ago. Yet there’s one thing that will be different this year: Taylor Swift will likely be at the game. Swift is dating Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce, and one thing you cannot accuse her of is being uncommitted. She’s attended 12 Chiefs games this season, including a home game against Miami that saw the wind chill hit minus 27 degrees and Swift peering through a frosted window like some figure from Scandinavian mythology.
Swift has been an interesting addition to the 2023 football season, both unavoidable and kind of natural. Endless articles have run about her, her wardrobe, her relationship with Kelce, the friends she brings to the games, what she drinks in her luxury box, whether she really cares about football, and whether she’s good for the sport. Yet for all the hyperventilating, she hasn’t really done much of anything. She’s just been there, watching the game, rolling her eyes at all the holding penalties the same as the rest of us.

Of course, in Swift’s case, it’s never as easy as just being there. She’s the most famous person on the planet, which means she’s going to draw attention whether she asks for it or not. Yet even allowing for that, it’s been difficult to comprehend the sheer vitriol that’s been leveled at her by some football watchers. Swift has been dragged on social media. Angry Ravens fans told her she is ruining the NFL. Even legendary announcer Al Michaels grumbled that she is a “sideshow.”
From there, it only got weirder. Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy hypothesized that Swift and Kelce’s relationship was a false flag to boost support for President Joe Biden. Fox News’s Jesse Watters wondered whether Swift was a Pentagon psy-op (the Defense Department later denied his claim). And over at One America News, host Alison Steinberg invoked Swift as a reason to condemn all youth sports as some kind of indoctrination ritual. (This is exactly how totalitarian regimes pacify their people: by keeping them fit and active.)
It all seems a bit much for a woman who just wants to cheer on her man. And isn’t that something we ourselves should be cheering on? Yet somehow Swift has become a symbol of everything wrong with professional football, if not all sports. Which raises a question: Have you seen professional football lately?
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It would be wrong to say the NFL is in a state of crisis. It’s the most lucrative sports league in the country, outhustling its nearest competitor, MLB, by more than $9 billion in annual revenue. The NFL raked in $19 billion last season, while the total value of all 32 of its teams stands at about $163 billion, more than the GDP of the nation of Ukraine.
If that’s a crisis, then we should all hope to be in crisis. Yet even as the NFL has become a business behemoth and an inescapable presence in American life, it’s also been wracked by a series of identity crises that have diminished public trust and called into question its future.
The most headline-grabbing of these was the so-called kneeling controversy, which began in 2016 when some players took a knee during the singing of the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. It continued through 2020 as the NFL responded to the death of George Floyd by plastering end zones with woke platitudes and committing to $250 million in donations to social justice groups. Some fans were outraged throughout and responded by boycotting the league, causing ratings to sag.

San Francisco 49ers outside linebacker Eli Harold, left, quarterback Colin Kaepernick, center, and safety Eric Reid kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Dallas Cowboys in Santa Clara, California, on Oct. 2, 2016. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Fast-forward to today and ratings have mostly rebounded, while kneeling prototype Colin Kaepernick, last seen suggesting Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani had been killed by American forces because he had brown skin, has been effectively banished from the league. Yet a suspicion lingers that the NFL has gone woke. And it dovetails with another suspicion: that the NFL has gone soft. In November, the legendary quarterback Tom Brady commented that there was too much “mediocrity” in the NFL today. The reason? Thanks to a tightening of rules to protect players on offense from injury, “every hit” made back by former defensive greats such as Ray Lewis and Rodney Harrison “would have been a penalty.”
He’s right. These days, the NFL tends to treat its receivers and especially its quarterbacks like they’re made of crystal, penalizing defenses for rough tackles. This has actually made the sport more entertaining in some respects. Football in 2024 is all about high-flying, risk-taking offenses — think this season’s Miami Dolphins — who use the advantage of additional protections to rack up flashy plays. It’s also true that the NFL’s hand has been forced here. Lawsuits over concussions, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the disturbing injuries last season to Damar Hamlin and Tua Tagovailoa, all of this has wrought what it will.
But then it’s also fed concerns among fans that the NFL is no longer committed to the purity of what is a fundamentally violent sport. This is underscored by the seemingly endless flags that get thrown every game, to the point that the referees can seem like a third team on the field. It’s probably an exaggeration to say every play in today’s NFL is either pass interference or holding, but it’s not too far off. This empowers the referee to become a kind of arbiter, able to throw flags when he likes and decide the outcomes of games and entire seasons. It also makes games less watchable as penalties cut into the action.

Buffalo Bills players react to an injury sustained by Damar Hamlin during a game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Jan. 2, 2023, in Cincinnati. (Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images)
And then, during the Super Bowl and some playoff games, when the NFL most needs the ratings, suddenly the flags disappear. This kind of caprice and even cynicism drives fans crazy. Because most regular-season games feature at least a couple gray-area flags, every fan base can complain its team was robbed when it loses. And because these complaints are usually refracted through social media, they quickly devolve into conspiracy theories. Did the referees make that questionable call because they’d been paid to throw the game? Because the script had been written in advance? The NFL ran a commercial last year mocking such conspiracy theories, but it has not seriously addressed the problems that undergird them.
Which brings us to another problem with today’s NFL: the influence of money. Professional football has long been a deeply commercialized sport, but it’s become particularly glaring under the current NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell. Since Goodell took over in 2006, annual revenue across the league has grown by 190%. The obsession with dollars runs all the way up: Goodell more than any other NFL commish is a puppet of the team owners who are businessmen and need to expand their earnings.

Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa hits the ground after a sack by Cincinnati Bengals’ Josh Tupou on Sept. 29, 2022. Tagovailoa left the game, was briefly hospitalized, and was placed under NFL concussion protocols. (David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
With money as such a paramount concern, the unthinkable has become the new normal. Twenty years ago, any kind of relationship between the NFL and sports gambling was strictly taboo, to the point that the league wouldn’t even allow a franchise to play in Las Vegas. Today, not only do the Raiders call Vegas home, but it’s hard to tell where the sport of football ends and the betting begins. The NFL began allowing marketing deals between teams and gambling companies in 2018, and a mere five years later, it was making $132 million a year from such sponsorships. Big betting has extended its tendrils into seemingly everything the NFL touches. Every third commercial during the games is for DraftKings. Every analyst in a one-horse market is brought to you by FanDuel.

A Draft Kings ad is seen on a building in preparation for last year’s Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on Feb. 11, 2023, in Phoenix. (Aaron M. Sprecher via AP)
When Goodell is asked about this, he pleads that the players still aren’t allowed to bet on games, which is true. But that’s a far cry from the Goodell of 2012 who warned, “If gambling is permitted freely on sporting events, normal incidents of the game such as bad snaps, dropped passes, turnovers, penalties, and play calling inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust, and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.” And so it is. Head to any NFL Facebook page today and you’ll find referees accused of throwing games to throw the odds, players accused of missing tackles because they had money riding on the other team. The league sees money as paramount, and increasingly the fans perceive that the league sees it that way, too.
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This is the NFL that Taylor Swift could very well marry into. It’s one where fans worry that the integrity of their game is being corrupted by left-wing politics, bicycle helmet safety culture, and big money. And it’s why she’s unfortunately become such a lightning rod.
Swift is not especially political, but when she does speak out, it’s clear her views tilt to the left, like Kaepernick’s. She’s a symbol of the millennial generation, which many older fans view as soft. And she’s an uber-rich celebrity whom the NFL has moved, er, swiftly to make as much money off of as possible. She might just be watching the game, but the cameras always seem to find her. Her very presence can seem like one giant endorsement deal. All this has turned her into a scapegoat among football purists, an embodiment of everything they think is wrong with the NFL.
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Yet surely you can understand these grievances — you can even share some of them, as I do — and still think that to blame them on Swift is dumb. Alienating the biggest influencer in America nine months before an election may be an unforced error too big for even Kadarius Toney.
Swift is often touted as a role model for girls. Whether you agree with that or not, she’s doing a pretty good job showing everyone how to be in a supportive and functional relationship in today’s busy world. There are many reasons why the NFL is in a state of disrepair, but she is not one of them.
Matt Purple is a writer and editor whose work has been featured in the Washington Examiner, American Conservative, Spectator, and many others. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children.