Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Kristen Wong

What Taylor Swift Was Talking to Tom Cruise About at Chiefs Game, and Why It Matters

Taylor Swift Tom Cruise Chiefs Taylor Alison Swift NFL Football Jason Kelce Bills Lions

A female fan talking about football at an NFL game? No way.

And not just any woman, either: Taylor Alison Swift.

The Eras Tour pop star made it out to see her husband’s first game of the season against the Broncos on Monday night and looked like she had a blast surrounded by her new in-laws and football friends. Swift had stayed away for a good portion of Kelce’s games last season for reasons unknown, but she was back at Arrowhead to see the Chiefs kick off their 2026 campaign. And the broadcast cameras wasted no time getting a shot of her in the suite, including one viral clip in which she was spotted chatting with movie star Tom Cruise.

As one can imagine, plenty of theories surfaced about what the two uber-popular celebrities might be talking about at a football game. Swift’s next album? Cruise’s next movie? The personal toll of fame and how many fans have developed a bottomless appetite for gossip as well as an unhealthy parasocial relationship with their idols?

The answer, as it turns out, was staring fans right in the face. They were talking about football.

“When the biggest movie star in the world is sitting next to the biggest artist in the world, what do you talk about?” Jimmy Fallon asked Cruise during his guest appearance Thursday night.

“She was schooling me on football,” Cruise said. “For real. ... First of all, she’s a genius. I’ve been following her since she was a kid. Everybody there, all their friends, they’re a beautiful couple and magical in their own right. Everybody there in that booth—I hadn’t been to a football game since pre-COVID when I was working—so to get to hang out there and have that moment, it was a lot of fun.”

“She knows her stuff,” added Cruise.

Outside of football, Cruise and Swift also talked about music and movies, with the Top Gun actor pointing out she had a “great sense of humor” and was a “brilliant writer.”

As Swifties know all too well, their pop idol had not been following the NFL prior to meeting Kelce. ("You know how to ball, I know Aristotle” was one lyric from a song dedicated to her now-husband.) On their very first date, Swift asked the Chiefs tight end what it was like playing his brother Jason in Super Bowl LIX.

“Jason, on our 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, across the line of scrimmage and saw his brother standing five feet in front of him on the field,” Swift recalled during her appearance on New Heights in August. “And he didn’t even look at me. Like I now know what an insane question that was. He was like, ‘Actually, I’m on the offense and my brother’s on the offense, and I’m only on the field at the same time as the defense.’

“I thought everyone was on the field at the same time. I thought that the quarterbacks ... I thought it was like Jared Goff is here and Josh Allen is here and they blow a whistle and then go at each other and it’s like who is going to win.”

But, like any woman dating the man of her dreams, she got to know his hobbies pretty well. And like she’s done throughout her decades-long, glittering career, obsessively mastering and honing her musical craft, so, too did she master the art of becoming a ball-knower.

“I fell in love with it,” Swift said of her football fandom. “I became obsessed with it. I became a person who was running through the halls of my house screaming, ‘We drafted Xavier Worthy! And my friends are like, ‘Who body snatched you? What do you mean?’ ”

People can study Cruise’s conversation with Swift through two distinct lenses. The first is cynical. Could Roger Goodell have somehow planted the seed of football in their heads and forced two of the most famous people in the world to talk about it for the publicity? After all, the NFL admitted this past offseason that it has been coordinating efforts to reach its female fans as part of a far-reaching content campaign involving players’ WAGs (wives and girlfriends). That’s partly why fans saw so many clips of Justin Herbert and Madison Beer or Joe Burrow and rumored girlfriend Olivia Ponton at training camp in the summer.

The other is the more natural and organic conclusion, which is: Swift just likes football now. Her prodigious reputation aside, that’s a great thing for the future of the sport. In a world in which Sydney Sweeney provocatively stripped down for an ad for the sports prediction market platform Novig, the discourse surrounding women in sports feels like it’s taken a step back recently. Even over in the WNBA, the most valuable women’s sports league in the world, the space has, in some unfortunate part, been co-opted by political figures pushing their own agendas. Swift talking ball with Cruise is by no means revolutionary—she is, at the end of the day, a football fan solely because of her husband. But it does convey the quiet, shouldn’t-need-to-be-said message that women genuinely enjoy sports, too. The rest is just free publicity for the NFL.

MORE NFL FROM SPORTS ILLLUSTRATED

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Why Does Ground Beef Sometimes Turn Brown Before the Sell-By Date?
You bought a package of bright red ground beef yesterday, put it straight into the refrigerator, and now part of it looks brown or gray. Does that mean you’ve just wasted several dollars on spoiled meat?
Grocery Coupon Guide
Grocery Coupon Guide
Amy Slaton Has Been on TLC for Years — How Much Is the ‘1000-lb Sisters’ Star Worth?
Amy Slaton has turned sharing her life with viewers into a career that has lasted far longer than many reality-TV runs. Since “1000-lb Sisters” debuted on TLC in January 2020, audiences have watched her weight-loss journey, motherhood, relationships, divorce and, most recently, her marriage to Brian Lovvorn.
Budget and the Bees
Budget and the Bees
27-year-old New Jersey man ate from a fast-casual chain for 25 straight days. He lost nine pounds in the process
In a daring personal challenge, an advertising professional committed to consuming only Sweetgreen meals for twenty-five consecutive days. This journey resulted in a nine-pound weight loss and a notable increase in his energy levels. However, he encountered logistical challenges and high costs throughout the experiment. Following his inspiring video, Sweetgreen…
The Economic Times
The Economic Times
"South Park" saw our food fights coming
For decades, the show has skewered the systems that turn eating into bureaucracy, branding and culture war
Salon
Salon
Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy as you age
Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting and preparing a response.
The Conversation
The Conversation
How to know if you can trust an AI’s answer to your question
I recently typed a simple question into Google search: How much screen time is too much for teenagers? Instead of presenting links, as Google had been doing for many years, it gave me an AI-generated answer. The artificial intelligence agent cited a number, then complicated that reply, noting that quality…
The Conversation
The Conversation
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.
Download on the AppStore Get it on Google Play