How did the tight end position arrive here? With Travis Kelce walking down a hallway wearing selections from his massive wardrobe full of opulent Marni tops and Thom Browne pants, hands clasped with the world’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift. Together, they shine like quasars, dominating the tabloids and melting the hearts of Swifties and (at least some) football fans alike.
This used to be the position of Mike Ditka, of puggle-faced men with flat-top haircuts straighter than concrete countertops. Of Dan Campbell, who sounds like an industrial machine when he talks and looks like he deadlifts Cadillacs.
Kelce is different. Like the great quarterback pitchmen of our time, he is omnipresent. He has become un-ignorable. He is hawking insurance, hot soup and pharmaceuticals. He cohosts the top sports podcast in the country with his older brother, Eagles center Jason. Donna Kelce has become the most recognizable mom in America. He is part John Cena, part John Candy, part John Wayne.
Kelce has been a star in the football universe for years. Now?
“My mother called me the other day and said, ‘Did you see that Travis is going to Argentina to see Taylor Swift?’ ” says Jenna Lemoncelli, a crossover sports and entertainment reporter for the gossip powerhouse “If you had asked her a few months ago who Travis Kelce was, she’d ask, ‘Is that a store?’ ”
Lemoncelli, who points out that is covering even the most routine of Kelce’s on-field receptions, says the Chief could “sneeze a certain way” and it would be “our No. 1 story, all day and all night.”
But as the Year of Kelce comes to an end, it’s important to note that we would not be where we are without his absolute and total football brilliance. Kelce has changed what is possible for tight ends off the field because he has transformed the position on it. Now in his 11th season, twice a Super Bowl champion, four times a first-team All-Pro, eight times a Pro Bowler, Kelce has cemented himself as one of the greatest tight ends in NFL history. Choose your preferred forum for a proper sports debate. Mount Rushmore? Top five? Dream Team? Kelce is there, not just merely in the conversation but dominating it.
Sometimes greatness is as simple as someone being bigger and stronger and faster, a lapse in some universal gene disbursement program that ended up handing all the good stuff to a singular human. In Kelce’s case, those who study the position deeply argue it is more Darwinian. About two decades ago, the tight end position began to shift.
Kelce was part of a small group of nomads who helped figure that out and changed the layout of a football field forever. In this way, Kelce and Swift pleasantly ducking the aim of celebrity photographers and pecking each other on the cheek is not just kindling for gawking eyes—some seemingly manufactured combination of entertainment monoliths exploiting their mutual interests—but also the finished stages of the tight end’s growth from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens.
Recruiters say it has never been easier to persuade kids to switch to tight end after having it be considered a bit of a career death sentence of blocking misery, while it seems defensive coordinators have never had a more difficult time handling what Kelce has helped the NFL morph into.
When one thinks of it that way, Kelce’s oeuvre is befitting of the star treatment. Our path here is worth revisiting.
“Kelce is an enigma. He’s a unicorn,” says Dallas Clark, one of the top tight ends of the 2000s and a deep thinker on the state of the position. “He’s one of those special ones.”
Clark says that, just as modern children will never be able to understand life before cellphones, youth football players today will never be able to understand the game before Kelce. It’s never going back.
