Mike Tirico Perfectly Speaks to the NFL’s Taylor Swift Truth

One of the biggest stories of the 2023 NFL season didn’t involve on-field matters at all. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are power players in their own right, and their joining forces pushed things to new heights (pun intended).

The Kansas City Chiefs tight end had to field plenty of questions about his potential partner, but things didn’t stop there. Swift featured in NFL broadcasts, whether she was in the building or simply alluded to, and even became the league’s X, formerly Twitter, header at one point.

And that rubbed some people the wrong way. Count Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Traina among them.

During a recent edition of the SI Media Podcast, Traina spoke with NBC’s Mike Tirico, who worked the Week 4 Sunday Night Football broadcast that had no problem highlighting Swift.

The play-by-play announcer didn’t crumble though. If anything, he gave a pretty perfect explanation of why the powers that be have embraced the pop star’s presence.

Tirico Talks Swift, Welcoming the Audience

Let’s flash back to October 1. On Sunday Night, the Kansas City Chiefs headed to MetLife Stadium to face the Aaron Rodgers-less New York Jets. And while the contest could have been a walk-over, the home team hung tough. K.C. emerged with a narrow 23-20 victory, but the scoreline wasn’t the main story.

Taylor Swift was.

As mentioned above, Swift was in the building that night, and largely stole the show. As Deadline wrote at the time, “‘Sunday Night Football’ [was] A Sideshow To Tonight’s Taylor Swift Appearance At N.Y. Jets Game.”

Tirico opened the evening by greeting the Swifties in the audience. The camera cut to Swift and Brittany Mahomes in the stands; a Chiefs touchdown was followed by a glimpse of Swift celebrating. The sideline report focused on Rodgers and Swift, neither of whom were on the field.

The following day, Sports Illustrated’s Traina wrote that NBC had embarrassed itself. And, at the end of November, he had a chance to press Tirico about that on his podcast.

For Tirico’s part, though, the play-by-play announcer shared a rather reasonable perspective.

“What’d you miss in the broadcast?” he rhetorically asked.

After a bit of back and forth with the host, the juicy quotes came out.

“Remember where it was. She was not a part of the story. She showed up as a surprise at the game the week before. And now she’s in New York with a whole celebrity, a whole Access Hollywood box of celebrities there, and they all showed up for a game,” Tirico explained. “So, remember this. One, it’s entertainment. Two, it’s prime time. Three, it didn’t take away from one replay of anything about the game. And, here’s the philosophy I approached it with: We have 20 million loyal viewers every week for Sunday Night Football. It’s a lot. It’s the most in prime-time TV. Don’t piss them off. Don’t take away from those folks.

“However, you have, and the ratings proved it, you have a few million people who don’t regularly watch your show on a regular basis who are coming in. So, if you have a group of eight that go to dinner and a couple people come to join you, make them feel welcome. So, we showed probably the most famous person in America a few times during the show. Didn’t take away from any replay, any X-O comment, anything about any of the players in the game. So, that’s the bottom line of it.”

And, on the subject of ratings, they did prove it. NBC Sports said that the Week 4 SNF contest drew an average of nearly 27 million viewers, making it the most-popular Sunday night broadcast since the Super Bowl. Viewership among girls 12-17, women 18-24 and women over 35 also experienced notable growth.

Tirico also spoke to that reality from a personal perspective.

“This is broadcast, and hundreds of friends of my daughter who were watching the game were like, ‘That was really cool that you guys did that.’ This is broadcasting, you’re trying to reach a broad audience. Right? And little bits that don’t take away from anything that happens on the football field, that’s going to welcome your audience. Don’t you want to grow the audience overall?”

The NFL Is in a Powerful Position to Expand

As Tirico said, audience is the key word. At the risk of being too cynical, money makes the world go round, and for a professional sports league, reaching a broader portion of the population is how you keep the numbers moving in the right direction.

And focusing on the NFL, the league already has North American sports in a stranglehold. As laid out by Forbes, pro football is one of the last stable pillars of TV viewing. During 2022, the NFL accounted for an incredible 82 of the top-100 most-watched telecasts.

Remember, that’s just Nielsen numbers. There are also fans packing stadiums, sitting in sports bars and streaming through a variety of platforms.

At the risk of sounding disrespectful to those people, it’s not about them. The NFL already has them on the hook, hence its status as a multibillion-dollar industry. Instead, it’s about broadening the reach.

In this specific Swift-related example, let’s return to both Tirico’s comments and the numbers. If a few comments during the broadcast or a strategically chosen social media image can make them feel welcomed in NFL land, why wouldn’t the league support it? (And yes, in this case, being welcomed is probably more about the bottom line than genuine inclusion.)

And you could even argue that it’s not specifically about Swift. She’s just an obvious means to an audience-based end.

Leaning on a pop star’s presence isn’t that different than playing a few games abroad each season. Were Chiefs fans thrilled, for example, that a marquee matchup against the Miami Dolphins was shipped to Germany? Probably not, but that’s not going to drive too many people to stop watching one of the league’s top teams. And if any viewers jumped off the bandwagon, the theoretical gains from reaching new fans would be worth the risk.

As the cliché goes, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Taken in isolation, can the focus on any one storyline, whether it’s Swift, Joshua Dobbs or anything else get annoying? Sure, but, on a larger scale, it makes perfect sense.

As much as sports fans love the on-field action, we’re talking about the entertainment business. And cash ultimately moves the needle.