Taylor Swift will once again be in attendance at Chiefs-Broncos on Thursday night to support Travis Kelce, but Prime Video play-by-play man Al Michaels is already tamping down expectations of the streamer’s Swift coverage.
“The vast majority of the audience are tuning in to watch a football game,” Michaels told Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated. “There are people … that if you trained the camera on her all night long, they’d be satisfied with that. This is not what we’re doing to do.”
Reaction to the NFL and its broadcasting partners leeching onto the Swift-Kelce romance is in its blowback phase. While some older broadcasters like Chris “Mad Dog” Russo and Michaels likely were never going to love the overt pop culture tie-in to game broadcasts, younger fans and women in particular certainly do. Still, with giveaways and promotions abound, Swift’s presence within pro football is growing beyond box seats and convertible rides with the Kelces.
Michaels wants to take it back to the basics of football despite Swift attending the game.
“The game is still the important element here, by far,” Michaels explained. “That’s our thought. After that, you sort of make it, one of my favorite words, farcical.”
The complexities of Prime Video viewership across multiple platforms might make it harder to observe Swift’s impact on audience tonight compared with the previous games she attended. Plus, Chiefs-Broncos is not exactly must-see-TV given how Denver has started its season.
But if Al Michaels has any say in it, viewers shouldn’t expect the Swiftie spectacle they may have gotten previously.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.