It’s Time to Stop Pretending the Super Bowl Is About Football

I don’t know how much of this country actually believes Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are part of a clandestine NFL deep state plot to re-elect Joe Biden. I haven’t yet seen any polling on that question. But there must be an audience for the conspiracy because it keeps getting pushed by far-right pundits, candidates and newscasters.

These incel-age Nostradomuses say that Swift and Kelce are an “artificially culturally propped-up couple,” that in fact “it’s all been an op since day one” and even that “major league sports, in and of itself is nothing but a psy-op.” Their conclusion is absurd, of course, but their premise is sound. This is the year of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl and, at least as a cultural moment, it feels too big to be true.

When asked about this conspiracy at his annual pre-Super Bowl press conference this week, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell broke out of his usual robot routine to joke “there’s no way I could have scripted that one.” His noticeable talking point here was that Swift “knows great entertainment.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.