Patrick Mahomes’ First Reaction to Travis Kelce Dating Taylor Swift
Patrick Mahomes needed a video review before making the final call.
The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback revealed he was hesitant to believe his teammate Travis Kelce was dating Taylor Swift until the “Lavender Haze” singer attended her first game at Arrowhead Stadium in September 2023.
“He told me during the week,” Patrick said of the tight end’s romance revelation in the ESPN docuseries The Kingdom. “It was one of those where I gotta see it until I believe it.”
However, once Taylor was cheering for her guy on the Chiefs alongside his mom Donna Kelce, the quarterback knew their love story was real.
“You definitely felt the buzz and you could see people in the stadium gravitating towards where she was up there,” the Super Bowl champ continued. Noting the team couldn’t afford a distraction, he added, “At the same time, we had business to handle.”
And now that Taylor has become a regular in the stands, Patrick—who shares kids Sterling, 4, Bronze, 2, and Golden, 7 months, with wife Brittany Mahomes—confessed he has enjoyed seeing the NFL’s rise in popularity among women, sharing, “I think any dad out there can say the fact that their daughter is watching these football games with them is one of the best moments that they’ll have in their life.”
And Brittany completely agreed.
“I grew up watching football with my dad and he absolutely loved it,” she said in the doc. “Patrick loves it when Sterling will sit down and watch football with him.”
Beyond celebrating Taylor’s impact on the sport, the Mahomes family is also ecstatic about her upcoming album The Life of a Showgirl. In fact, the pair learned of the album before Taylor and Travis released the Aug. 13 episode of his and Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast, where they announced TS12.
“They called [Brittany] after the podcast was done…and I was in the back of the FaceTime," Patrick told reporters Aug. 13. "I'm obviously super excited. Just knowing Taylor and seeing the process from just a little bit closer of how she makes the albums, it's going to be amazing because of how much work she puts into it."
Read on to learn everything Taylor revealed about The Life of a Showgirl—and her relationship with Travis—during the New Heights episode.
As the couple's love story goes, Travis Kelce landed on the Taylor Swift's radar when he shared his frustrations in failing to give her a friendship bracelet with his number on it at Eras Tour's Arrowhead Stadium stop on a July 2023 New Heights podcast episode.
Well, according to Taylor, Travis "didn't even reach out" to her management to set up a possible meeting in the first place.
"He thought because he knows the elevator lady, that he could just talk to her about getting down to my dressing room," she quipped in an August 2025 New Heights episode. "He really was just like, 'I know a guy. I can figure this out.'"
As for the friendship bracelet, Taylor said she's still "never seen the original."
Travis added, "They didn't leave the stadium because I was butt hurt."
Travis detailed the exact moment he knew he wanted to date Taylor, telling her on his podcast, "If I would have never gone to that show and been mesmerized and just been captivated, and then left with such a desire to want to meet you, I would have never went on here and told everybody how butt hurt I was.”
Explaining how he was "so engulfed in the curiosity" of Taylor, the athlete continued, "You see how crazy you can get an entire stadium going, And then I get you in a room and it’s like I’ve known you forever.”
It was a sentiment shared by Taylor, who responded, "I felt the same exact way about you.”
“Whatever Andy Reid says, we’re gonna stand by,” Taylor responded. “That’s what happened.”
She revealed that her dad Scott Swift has been longtime friends with the Kansas City Chiefs coach, so Andy has been coming to her concerts for years.
Noting that her dad “is the most social man who’s ever been born,” Taylor explained that she’s “always had a really positive vibe” when interacting with Andy.
“I didn’t really know what the sports were that he was doing but I knew that that was my dad’s friend Andy Reid,” she added. “I now know that he is the most iconic, legendary coach of all time.”
Ultimately, Andy "vouched" for Travis—and a lot of Taylor's family and friends also put in a good word after he decided to shoot his shot on New Heights.
"My cousins were like, ‘Please please please, he’s amazing,'" Taylor recalled. "There was a lot of people whispering in my ear about you and that’s not normal. There are people just willing to go to bat for you."
The Grammy winner admittedly fumbled on asking the Kansas City Chiefs tight end a football question during their first date.
"I legitimately asked him what it was like when the Chiefs played the Eagles in the Super Bowl and he looked across the field," Taylor recalled, "and saw his brother standing five feet away."
Two years later, Taylor realized it was an "insane question" to ask since the brothers were never on the field at the same time due to their positions. Still, she said Travis patiently explained the game, leading her to develop a passion for the sport.
"He was like, 'Actually, I'm on the offense and my brother is on the offense. I'm only on the field the same time as the defense,'" she recounted. "I thought everyone was on there at the same time."
While announcing her 12th album would arrive Oct. 3, 2025, Taylor said that she selected just 12 songs for The Life of a Showgirl to keep "the bar really high" and make the record "just right" with a holistic theme (so no, there won't be more songs coming).
The inspiration was about going "behind the curtain" of the Eras Tour.
"This album was about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour," Taylor said, "which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant."
She continued, "It just comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life, so that effervescence has come through on this record."
On her days off from the tour, Taylor worked with hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback in Sweden to create these "infectious anthems," including the titular track with Eras Tour opener Sabrina Carpenter.
In addition to "The Life of a Showgirl," the tracks will be "The Fate of Ophelia," "Elizabeth Taylor," "Opalite," "Father Figure," "Eldest Daughter," "Ruin the Friendship," "Actually Romantic," "Wi$h Li$t," "Wood," "Cancelled!" and "Honey."
The football player praised her 12 tracks as "bangers," confirming he's heard every song. Meanwhile, Jason hasn't listened to any but joked he wants to get his hands on the album before the Oct. 3 release date.
“A huge green flag,” Taylor noted, “is that Travis has had the same friends since he was probably 4 years old. And he's incredibly good at maintaining friendships and he’s so loyal and his friends are equally loyal.”
And after bonding with his pals in the NFL box at Arrowhead Stadium, she added, “They’re the funniest most hilarious group of people.”
And Taylor’s game day behavior impressed Travis, too.
“You wanna talk about green flags?” he quipped. “The first game she went to, the Bears game, she literally went through the front door of the stadium, though general admission."
That move immediately convinced him she was down to become part of Chiefs Kingdom: “I was just like, ‘Oh, she’s just in it. She’s down for the ride. She’s here for the fun.’”
Another thing Taylor appreciates about her NFL star boyfriend? The fact that he didn't judge her for her lack of football knowledge.
"You're so nonjudgemental about people and you weren't judgmental about the fact I knew nothing about the world you were in," she told Travis. "I didn't know what a first down was. I didn’t know what a tight end was."
And while Travis responded, "I am forever thankful for you diving into the football world whole-heartedly," Taylor noted she did more than dive in.
"I became obsessed with it," she said. "My friends were like, 'Who body snatched you?'"
Travis' brother and cohost Jason Kelce started tearing up when Taylor described Travis as a "human exclamation point," gushing that his vibe is like "when you take a picture on your phone and you push the enhance color button."
That's what you do to everyone's life,” Taylor explained, while Jason smiled and appeared emotional. "I use so many more exclamation points now."
"I'd say all my hobbies could be categorized as hobbies you could have had in the 1700s," Taylor quipped. "I like to sew—I specialize in children's purses and baby blankets. I love to paint. I love to cook."
In fact, she admitted that she has a "different baking obsession every six months," with sourdough being the one that's "taken up my life" during the episode's recording.
"I'm always baking bread and texting my friends like, 'Can I send you some bread?,'" Taylor added. "I'm on sourdough blogs. There's a whole community of us, and I didn't know it."
Speaking about her love of baking, the "Blank Space" singer shared she's been working on creating a new variety of sourdough bread for Jason and wife Kylie Kelce's young daughters Wyatt, Elliotte, Bennett and Finnley.
“There’s one I've been workshopping for the girls because they love everything rainbow: Funfetti sourdough," she revealed. "Because they love sprinkles. We put sprinkles in everything when we hang out."
Bread aside, Taylor also bonded with Jason's girls through her cats Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson and Benajmin Button.
"It was actually really a great challenge, because as soon as I got the kids around the cats, it was my goal to prove to them that they weren’t poisonous,” she shared. "And there’s no better way to prove that than to just hand them Benjamin, my rag-doll cat, who lets humans hold him like he’s a baby.”
Taylor bought the master recordings of her first six albums—Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Reputation—in May 2025 after a years-long battle to obtain them.
Before striking the deal with Shamrock Capital, the "Bad Blood" artist had her mom Andrea Swift and brother Austin Swift handle the negotiations "rather than send lawyers or management."
"I'm in the business of human emotion, so I would so much rather lead heart-first in something like this," she tearfully explained, "because to me this isn't something like, 'I want to own this asset because of its return.' I want it because these are my handwritten diary entries from my whole life."
So, Taylor said her family told Shamrock "all the times we’ve tried to buy it, all the times it’s fallen through, all the times we had gotten plans together and figured out something we thought was gonna work and then it didn’t at the last minute."
"There's dos and don'ts," she noted. "I'm never going to plant an Easter egg that ties back to my personal life. It's always going to be towards music, something I have coming up."
And while she jokingly admitted that the practice has become "a little Zodiac killer," Taylor said she'll keep dropping clue as long as fans enjoy them.
"I want Easter eggs to be a certain thing where if you are a part of the fandom and you want to experience music in a normal way, then then you don't even see these," she said. "If you know, you know."
According to Taylor, the idea of having Travis join her on stage all started out as a "bit."
"It was a 'wouldn't it be funny if' kind of thing," she explained. "But when when we were talking about it, I saw that little twinkle in [his] eye.'"
But for Travis, it was anything but a joke. As he noted, "I was serious in a terrifying fashion."
The "Cruel Summer" hitmaker recorded her 12th studio album with producers Max Martin and Shellback during the European leg of her Eras Tour. According to Taylor, she would fly to Sweden to record whenever there was a multi-day break in between shows.
"This album was about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour," she explained, "which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant."
That's why Taylor said the album is filled with "bangers."
"It just comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life," she added, "so that effervescence has come through on this record."
She explained that the cover art—taken by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot, who also worked on her reputation photoshoot—represented her mood after getting into the bath at the end of the night after performing on the Eras Tour.
"When all this has gone down, you won't be able to get to bed until 4 in the morning," Taylor reflected, "but you had to jump through 50 million hoops in this obstacle course that is your show. And you did it. You got two more in a row, but you did it tonight."
The superstar wanted a pic of her “behind the scenes” instead of in showgirl mode, because “this album isn’t really about what happened to me onstage. It’s about what I was going through offstage... This, to me, tells more of what the actual contents lyrically of the album are.”
Though the cover art is minty green with a depiction of Taylor in a pool, she said the Life of a Showgirl era is orange to capture its sunny mood.
"It feels like energetically how my life has felt," she mused. "And this album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant."
"We don't," she bluntly put it. "Anything you feed your brain, it will internalize. Anything you feed the internet, it will kill. I've been in the music industry for 20 years. It's pretty hard to hurt my feelings at this point."
In fact, Taylor quipped, "Something can be about me, my name can be in the actual headline, and it can still be none of my business."
Explaining that she's been about to "mediate a really healthy relationship with not seeing a whole lot" on social media, the singer added, "I do detach from the internet in a huge way."
Taylor said she spent her summer 2025 with her dad following his quintuple bypass surgery, sharing he was the “loveliest patient ever” and has been doing “incredibly well” since the procedure.
“He was the funniest he's ever been—and he's usually really funny,” she shared of his post-op behavior. “He didn't know how many blockages he had and I was like, ‘Dad, you had a quintuple bypass. You had five. That's crazy. It's more than we thought.’ And he's like, ‘Well, you see, I come from a very competitive family.’”
Andrea has also been “doing great” after getting a new knee this summer, according to Taylor.
“They're two of my best friends and I just adore them,” the Miss Americana star explained of her parents. “It was actually one of the most special things that's ever happened to me, spending all that time with them this summer. You have those long talks that you don't have when it's a small, concentrated period of time.”
“I can deny!" she said of the rumor that she played a costumed bear in the 2025 Adam Sandler comedy, which also costarred Travis. "I’m honored to be thought of in that context, because I loved that movie so much."
Taylor added, “Whoever did the bear’s acting was exquisite.”
Her favorite moment from watching the guy on the Chiefs actually involved his mom Donna Kelce.
"We're in the suite, [Travis] had just won the AFC Championship," Taylor recalled. "We’re freaking out, everybody’s screaming. And his mom goes, ‘Alright, let’s go down to the field.’ And I was like, ‘What? What do you mean?'"
Noting that she and Travis hadn't discussed her joining him on the field beforehand, Taylor said she worried that Travis was going to be like, "What are you doing here, dude?"
"[Donna] was like, ‘Trust me he wants you there,'" she remembered. "And I was like, 'OK, well, she would know.'"
In the end, Taylor's glad she took Donna's advice and got to have the "magical" experience with Travis—even if she'd "never seen this many cameras."
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