Reflections on the Taylor Swift Bowl

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/02/2024 (523 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the occasion of Super Bowl 58 – an NFL championship game submersed with more culture wars and wild conspiracies than ever before – the history books will record the final score as Kansas City Chiefs/Pentagon/NATO/Taylor Swift/President Biden 25 – San Francisco 49ers/conspiracy lovers/MAGA cult members/anti-vaxxers/bloggers in pajamas living in their parent’s basement 22.

In an overtime thriller, the 49ers played valiantly but having to beat the Chiefs plus the White House and the Department of Defense was just too steep a hill to climb.

Big-time kudos to 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy. The very last player chosen in the 2022 NFL draft (the 262nd player selected overall, earning him the name “Mr. Irrelevant”), Purdy played a whale of a game and almost defeated a dynasty (in the Chiefs) and a living legend (Patrick Mahomes). Purdy made the league minimum this year; look for him to get a massive and well-deserved raise this summer.

Funny thing. The half-time show wasn’t interrupted by Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce joining Taylor Swift at midfield to endorse President Biden as laughably predicted by many on the right.

Speaking of Kelce, he did himself a huge disservice by screaming at his coach. Supporting Black Lives Matter and making PSAs encouraging people to get life-saving vaccines makes him a great role model. Yelling in his coach’s face and show that level of disrespect in front of his teammates, the fans in the bleachers and the millions watching on national television, makes him a horrible role model.

The game was played just days after a special prosecutor called into question President Biden’s mental acuity when he cleared Biden of any wrongdoing regarding classified documents. So my question to angry conservatives remains unchanged: Is President Biden cognitively challenged or is he so powerful and competent that he rigged the Chiefs’ playoff games to make sure they got to the Super Bowl? (Here’s a hint for those that have trouble with logic and common sense — it can’t be both.)

Shortly after the game, President Biden sent out the best meme ever, trolling all the right-wingers who maintain Biden engineered the outcome of the Chiefs playoff games to promote Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. With a picture of Biden beaming and lasers shooting out of his eyes was the simple yet brilliant caption: “Just like we drew it up.”

I. Love. It. When I went to bed Sunday night it had already been viewed 50 million times. Sometimes the most effective way to counter lunatic conspiracy theories is to mercilessly mock them.

So much for the idiotic belief that Taylor Swift is somehow bad for the Chiefs, the NFL and the game of football.

According to Apex Sports Marketing, Swift has enhanced the brand value of the Chiefs and the NFL by an astonishing $313 million dollars. Thanks to ratings juggernaut Swift, the game between the Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens was the most watched AFC championship in NFL history. The Taylor Swift Bowl had over 200 million viewers, making it not just the most watched Super Bowl ever, but the most watched TV show in the history of humankind. Sorry conservatives, your attempted take down of Swift was a spectacularly pathetic failure of historic proportions.

Just curious, do the people who are so upset that Taylor Swift gets an average of 24 seconds of TV screen time per game similarly outraged when male celebrities are shown at Los Angeles Kings or LA Lakers games? This wouldn’t have anything to do with misogyny, would it?

Swift has had such an enormous impact on the Super Bowl that for the first time in history (or should we, given Swift’s effect on the game, call it ‘herstory’?), most of the TV ads were geared for women, not men. She single-handedly changed the nature of NFL advertising. Now that is power.

In the end, there is something grotesque about the Super Bowl and what it says about society. It is estimated that people bet $21.3 billion on the game. When you think of the ticket sales, the ridiculous bonuses the millionaire players got, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on advertising and all the other monies that changed hands, the social cost of all that money being spent on a 60-minute football game instead of schools, hospitals, mental health initiatives, infrastructure, medical research, school lunches and so on, is incalculable.

Just think what $30 billion could do to improve society. Our priorities seem astonishingly out of whack.