A look back at the last Sunday before the NFL's Taylor Swift Era ahead of Super Bowl 58

To prepare for Super Bowl Sunday, I decided to spend more than 3 hours rewatching the Jaguars home opener of the 2023 season.

Why? Because we now know that Week 2 game against the Kansas City Chiefs was the end of an era. The NFL BTS. Before Taylor Swift.

Sept. 17, 2023, it turns out, was the last Chiefs game before the pop star first appeared in a suite at an NFL stadium and, as quite a few other commentators and fans already have opined, completely ruined the experience of sitting in your living room to watch an NFL game.

Oh, there were hints of what was to come even then, rumors about Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce dating Taylor.

Kelce had missed the season opener, a loss to Detroit, with an injury. And when he caught a 9-yard pass from Patrick Mahomes at EverBank Stadium, CBS announcer Ian Eagle referenced a 2014 song: “Kelce finds a blank space for the score!” Then, before going to commercials, Eagle added, “Injured last week, he will shake it off in Week 2.”

The Chiefs won 17-9 that day. And just four days later, on The Pat McAfee Show, Kelce revealed he had invited Swift to come watch him play.

“I told her, ‘I’ve seen you rock the stage in Arrowhead, you might have to come see me rock the stage in Arrowhead,’” he said.

That following weekend, she was in a suite at the Chiefs stadium. And when some network producer decided to cut to her, it instantly marred NFL games for the millions of Americans who watch football to see … football.

Granted, if you want to get picky, there isn’t a lot of actual football in a football broadcast. The Wall Street Journal once ran a story with a headline that said: “11 Minutes of Action.” And that might’ve been an exaggeration. Based on an analysis of four games, it said, the amount of actual football in a football broadcast was 10 minutes and 43 seconds.

Considering the average length of an NFL game is about 3 hours and 12 minutes, this means that during an average telecast a network is filling your TV screen with about 3 hours of material that isn’t actual live football.

Ever since Sept. 17, every time Taylor shows up at a game, those three hours have been filled with shots of her, right? It was one thing for the cameras to constantly show Jack Nicholson at a Lakers game, Spike Lee at a Knicks game, Bill Murray at a Cubs game or — as the networks often like to do — some “celebrity” you’ve never heard of but is appearing on a new show and just happens to have box seats at the World Series.

But this was somehow different. Taylor and Travis was a TNT that made heads explode.

OK, so when the New York Times analyzed the telecasts of Chiefs games with Taylor in the house, it found that she typically is shown to homes across America for less than 25 seconds.

Still, can you imagine what else a network could show in those 25 seconds?

I don’t have to imagine.

Rewatching not-so-classic NFL game

That’s why I sat down and rewatched the CBS broadcast of the Jaguars home opener against the Chiefs.

CBS also is broadcasting the Super Bowl. And as you might have heard, the Chiefs are playing in it and Taylor Swift might be there. There will be 7 hours of pregame coverage. This is not an exaggeration. There literally will be 7 hours of pregame, followed by a football game that, with an extended halftime and extra commercials, will last much longer than 3 hours and still involve maybe 11 minutes of football.

So with this in mind, I grabbed a beer — not a Bud Light, of course, it was canceled during the 2023 season — and sat down to enjoy Jags-Chiefs, a much-hyped rematch from last season’s playoffs, a football telecast from a bygone era.

I could tell you it was a riveting 3 hours of football.

I would be lying.

It was a horrible game. The Jaguars failed to score a touchdown. The Chiefs won despite 12 penalties and three turnovers. And it wasn’t just the bad football.

I’ll go ahead and say it: Paying attention to everything else that was shown in those 3 hours made me think 25 seconds of Taylor Swift isn’t exactly the end of the NFL world.

∎ We’ll be back right after this …

Flo from Progressive. The LiMu Emu. Jake from State Farm. Patrick Mahomes and more Patrick Mahomes. The Chiefs quarterback might’ve been on the Jags-Chiefs broadcast more during commercial breaks, pitching bundling, than he was during the game, throwing passes.

The Super Bowl will have about 7 minutes of additional commercials, compared to a regular season game. But at least some of those ads will be quite entertaining and, at the very least, most will feel new.

To watch a typical NFL game, though, is to slog through the same commercials you’ve seen a zillion times. Some were entertaining the first 100 times. Some were painful the first time. Some come with warnings about death and other potential side effects.

But, hey, back to the football.

∎ Watch this again, and again, and …

Just how many replays are there in an NFL game? An average broadcast includes more minutes of replays than minutes of actual plays. I suppose this is a little better when more of the plays are worth rewatching. In this game, though, it was almost as tedious as another “Yellowstone” promo. Almost.

∎ CBS gave viewers way more than 25 seconds of Kevin Costner. And he wasn’t even at the game. At seemingly every break, there was a promo telling viewers that they could now watch “Yellowstone” on CBS. The network also sprinkled in some promos for a “60 Minutes” feature on Deion Sanders, an episode of the “Amazing Race,” a game show called “Raid the Cage” and, in case you forgot what you just saw a few minutes earlier, another “Yellowstone” promo.

∎ Fan shots.

Fans in the stands. Fans in the pool. Fans celebrating. Fans grimacing. Fans with towels of their heads to deal with the heat. Guess what, a typical NFL broadcast has all kinds of fan shots. Even some of familiar faces in the suites.

∎ Sideline reports, mostly about how it was hot in Florida in September.

I will give Evan Washburn, clad in the blue CBS blazer, credit for a good line: “I’m like Albert Brooks in ‘Broadcast News’ down here.”

∎ Upon further review.

The NFL’s reviews tend to drag on and on. And in this game, there was one challenge where CBS showed a split screen: Chiefs coach Andy Reid, the referee reviewing the play, Jaguars coach Doug Pederson. This alone lasted longer than 25 seconds, leading the announcers to veer into a discussion about what the referee does for his weekday job. Moments like this made me think that, upon further review, “Killers of the Flower Moon” felt like a short film.

∎ City shots.

In Jacksonville, CBS showed aerial shots of downtown and the beach. This Sunday prepare for about 58 shots of the Sphere in Las Vegas.

∎ “Players standing around between plays”

A few years ago, Vox analyzed telecasts and broke down, by percent of the time on the screen, what we’re shown during a typical broadcast. Commercials came in second, topped only by one other category, what it labeled as “players standing around between plays” — at 35.5 percent, far ahead of the 8.3 percent of a broadcast devoted to players playing.

In this game, there were lots of shots of Travis Kelce. Not just when he was on the field, lining up, blocking, running a route, catching a pass in the endzone, dropping another. There were numerous shots of him on the sideline. Taking off his helmet, taking a drink, watching the action.

There weren’t any shots of a certain pop star yet, but after the game mercifully came to an end and CBS showed Kelce running off the field, the network did give viewers a glimpse of a celebrity, Kevin Costner in “Yellowstone.”

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Watching Jaguars Chiefs game from era before Taylor Swift