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Al Michaels has been calling games in primetime longer than most of us have even been alive. He’s a member of the Sportscasting Hall of Fame and has well over 400+ primetime NFL games under his belt during his 40 year career and there’s almost nothing he isn’t prepared to handle, nothing other than Taylor Swift suddenly showing up at NFL games.
Al Michaels was asked about this recently and had a very blunt response to Taylor Swift’s omnipresence at the games she’s attended. He summed it up by telling Jimmy Traina that you “can’t make a sideshow the show.”
Flash forward a few days, sportscaster Al Michaels was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live which is slightly ironic given the role of a sportscaster to not inject themselves into the games too much. But Al Michaels had some interesting things to say about Taylor Swift, and one comment that stood out was he “didn’t know how to describe her.” The man was literally stumped by T-Swift at the game.
Speaking about Taylor Swift, who has been a guest on Jimmy Kimmel as well in the past, Al Michaels said “I had to acknowledge it, but what do you do? You can’t fool around, otherwise people will say that sounds hokey and the whole thing. We had a shot of her and I didn’t know how to describe her.”
Michaels settled on calling her Travis Kelce’s “good buddy and girlfriend” and Jimmy shut that down telling him it “can’t be both.” Al admitted he wanted to call her Travis Kelce’s “fiancée” but stopped himself.
This is a conundrum for him, of course, because on the one hand her presence is larger than life. She’s the most famous musician on Earth at this moment in time with her Eras Tour + concert film. The flip side is that NFL fans are generally tired of hearing about it.
There are plenty of people in the comments of every article about the Kelce-Swift relationship feigning anger over her mentions but the reality is most football fans just don’t care and they want to go back to talking about the games. So Al Michaels is stuck in the middle where he has to mention it but in a way that doesn’t overshadow the game’s action. And I guess that’s what it takes to stump him on air because he said he didn’t know how to describe her.