The biggest game of the NFL season is upon us as the Kansas City Chiefs travel to Buffalo to face the Bills on Sunday afternoon.
Know who else will be around Lake Ontario this week? International superstar and Travis Kelce’s girlfriend Taylor Swift, who’s nearing the end of a nearly two-year Eras Tour.
Just a coincidence? Sources tell CBS Sports actually … yes.
“Completely unintentional,” a league source said earlier this week about the scheduling.
Though nothing has been confirmed in NFL circles yet, the expectation is Swift will attend Highmark Stadium on Sunday for the game, one day after she will have played three consecutive shows in Toronto.
Teams regularly ask the NFL to avoid — or book — certain dates for a variety of reasons. After six straight years of finishing the regular season on the road, the Jets requested and finally received a season-finale home game at MetLife Stadium this year, for example.
The league did work around Swift’s tour in some regards. The NFL did not plan home games for the Saints, Dolphins and Colts when their home stadiums were hosting Swift for the Eras Tour.
The NFL works with Amazon Web Services to devise each season’s schedule. This year there were one quadrillion schedule possibilities for a 272-game season, and the league considered more than 26,000 factors when making the schedule.
But Swift’s tour stop in Toronto was not one of them.
“The teams are honest with us about stadium availability,” Mike North, the NFL’s VP of broadcast planning, told CBS Sports in May ahead of the schedule release. “Some of these teams share their stadiums, whether it’s with Major League Baseball teams, if not stadiums, at least downtown footprint, municipal services, parking lots. We’ve got MLS teams playing in our buildings. Sometimes you’ve got a major golf tournament or a NASCAR race in the market.
“And yeah, every now and then a stadium asks for us to consider having the NFL team on the road a certain weekend because they have an event that they have an opportunity to book in their building, whether it’s the truck and tractor pull or a pop superstar concert or any other reasons. So try to take that all into consideration. Put it in the soup and just keep stirring and hope that where we land, at the end of the day, you know, if not satisfies everybody, disappoints everybody evenly and hopefully only a little.”
For the profile of this game, the NFL could have placed this rivalry matchup just about anywhere on the schedule. And whether the Chiefs were playing in Buffalo this weekend or any other stadium, it’s probable Swift could have gotten wherever Kelce was on the field.
In February for Super Bowl LVIII, Swift made it to Las Vegas in time for the game after playing a show in Tokyo that weekend. Getting her plane from Toronto to any NFL stadium this weekend would have been much easier than that.
After her three shows this week, Swift has open dates on Sunday through Wednesday before returning to the Rogers Centre for three more shows. She finishes the tour, which began in March 2023, in Vancouver in early December.
She has already attended all five Chiefs home games this season. Since her first appearance in a suite on Sept. 24, 2023, which was a 41-10 win at Arrowhead over the Bears, the Chiefs are 18-3 with Swift in attendance. Of course, they’re 23-5 since that date regardless of whether Swift’s in the building.
It’s impossible to know just how great the so-called Taylor Swift Effect has been on the NFL, but no one at the league is denying it. The NFL reportedly saw big ratings boosts in the female 12-17 and 18-49 demographics in her first appearance at a Chiefs game last September.
Her impact on the league from a social media perspective was “honestly unlike anything we’ve seen,” one league executive told CBS Sports last fall.
“Obviously the Kansas City Chiefs are a pretty big brand, seeing the 12-year-old girls wearing number 87 Chiefs jerseys. It’s fun for all of us to see,” North said in May. “And while I don’t have daughters, I do have nieces. And maybe my favorite thing about what’s happening now is, you know, if Taylor Swift is getting those little girls in front of a television screen to watch NFL football, yes, they’re looking to see Taylor, but they’re also starting to see an incredible amount of women in really prominent positions.
“They’re seeing women game officials. They’re seeing women coaches. They’re seeing women announcers. If we can bring more little girls to the television screen and they can see themselves looking back at them, there’s nothing but a positive there. So, yes, the Taylor Swift effect is real, but I can’t say that the Kansas City Chiefs got more national television because their tight end is dating a pop superstar. They got national television because they’ve played their way into those windows.”
THE NFL TODAY will be live from Buffalo on Sunday. Fans can join the crew in Lot 6 at Highmark Stadium starting at noon ET on Nov. 17.