Bigger Than Football

In a previous post I told the story of how a 50ish-year-old Gen Xer who remembers typewriters and loves Billy Joel’s music more than life also became a sort-of-Swiftie. But I have a postscript.

I fell down the Taylor Swift rabbit hole about the time Taylor began her relationship with Travis Kelce, which trust me, everyone has an opinion on. (Is it a psyop? A PR stunt? A rom-com we are all actually living in unbeknownst to us? An effort by Taylor to not have to spend her days with another tortured poet? Will we ever know and, really, do we ever need to?)

What interests me the most, or almost the most, about the relationship, though, is that in the course of following it I realized that Taylor was doing something I hadn’t really thought possible: she was bringing viewers to the NFL. So many of them that the NFL was changing its marketing strategy because of her. The NFL changed its profile picture on Twitter X to one of her when she started showing up at games.

Now, I like football. I like sports in general. Particularly I like baseball, I like basketball, and I like football. I like college and pro football. I am, as a Gen Xer, young enough to have had a dad who played sports with me as well as my brother (and took us both to ball games and taught us both to root for all the teams from the state of Michigan – except for Michigan State), but old enough to know that this was an exception to the general rule. Individual girls liked football and other sports, sure. But football was for guys. It was just a thing they kind of let us show up for too sometimes. Nothing girls cared about would ever compare to football.

And somehow it moved me and startled me and changed my perspective on myself as a girl that, in Taylor Swift, girls now had something that was bigger than football.

I thought about this again when I found out that Swifties were buying NFL-themed gingerbread houses (because of course there are NFL-themed gingerbread houses) and redoing them as ERAS Tour stadiums. Like, literally taking something designed for guys and making it something designed for girls without apologizing. Without making it less than. Without, as folks still do in many high schools across the countries, naming the boys’ team the (let’s say) Pirates and the girls’ team the Lady Pirates.

And then I set it all aside until I woke up this morning to the news that this year’s Travis-and-Taylor Super Bowl was the most watched sports program in television history – that it was outshone (ba-dum bum) only by the moon landing – another thing that was designed by guys and for guys and featured guys. (As we’ve all learned since, the guys didn’t get there without the contributions of women. But I digress.)

And also to this parody of Shakespeare from my friend Beth Felker Jones, which I have permission to quote: