It’s the Super Bowl of Weddings

It’s the Super Bowl of Weddings 

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are getting married, announcing their engagement just as the 2025 NFL season prepares to kick off. It’s another example of how football always wins.

Hey, did you hear: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged to be married. This news was as shocking as learning that Friday comes after Thursday—the singer and tight end have been inseparable for nearly two years—but it was still a big deal, because everything Swift is a big deal, and also because it involves football, the last campfire of American life. The NFL always wins. I’ve had this thought many times before, but never as much as I did when a Journal colleague called me— that’s right, on the telephone, like it was an emergency, like Herbert Hoover was in office—with the breaking engagement bulletin. These crazy lovebirds, I thought. 

They timed it to the NFL season kickoff. Ordinarily, the league relies on standard drama to sow interest in its September launch—can the Eagles repeat as champions; will this be Josh Allen’s time; has Aaron Rodgers found a Pittsburgh private chef who can also read tarot cards. Now the NFL gets to entangle its mighty brand in the most powerful of synergies: a royal wedding. 

Actually, it’s bigger than one of those. They will never do it, because it’s too tacky to bear, and they don’t need the money, but here’s an interesting thought exercise for media dorks: What would the price be if Swift and Kelce were to sell the live rights to their wedding for television? We know the NFL collects more than $110 million for a single playoff game—that’s what Peacock paid, and that was two whole years ago. 

Your standard live sports deal now hits 10 figures, easy. March Madness gets a billion annually to show college kids bricking 3-pointers. Paramount is set to pay more than $1 billion a year for humans pounding each other inside a steel cage.

I assume they’ll figure it out. Swift just orchestrated the most successful stadium tour in the history of music—I think she can sort out chicken and/or beef and/or fish or vegetarian options and whether or not they need a DJ or just use an old iPod. Who wouldn’t want to help Taylor Swift with her wedding? Jeff and Lauren probably have napkins, chairs and Michelangelo sculptures left over from their Venice epic. I’d give them a call. If you’re one of the holdouts, the blasé, the bored, the folks wondering what a sportswriter is doing writing about a tender impending union, I can only say…the Good Ship Crankypants set sail a long time ago. I do understand, however, and I assure you that you don’t have to attend the wedding if you don’t want to—just send one of those KitchenAid mixers everyone likes and be done with it. Swift herself is charmingly aware of the fatigue, saying during her recent appearance on the Kelce Bros. podcast: “We all know that if there’s one thing that male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens, it’s me.” She gets it. And yet football is business before anything, and Kelce-Swift is a proven boon for that growing business, and related chatter, and clicks, and a footballmusic superwedding will only increase the tonnage. ESPN, sweating its venture into the direct-toconsumer landscape, sent me a giddy text alert about the engagement— as if the Mariners won the World Series. Everyone will get in on this clambake now—not just the sports and celebrity ecosystem, but the entire wedding industrial complex, the bridal experts, the ring evaluators, the cake bosses, Champagne consiglieries and stuffy people who say rude things about cuff link choices. Right now, there are hopeful wedding bands in Ohio, Pennsylvania and maybe Tennessee rehearsing “Brick House” and “Love Shack,” leaving an open vocal part just in case you-knowwho wants to join. Jim Nantz is huddling with Tony Romo to decide how many wedding jokes they’re allowed to make during games before fans start lighting up the CBS switchboard. They’re in love, they don’t care who knows it, and this is happening. Enjoy the NFL wedding season, and please respond to the card: chicken or beef?