Taylor Swift Name-Drops Jared Goff on New Heights; Lions QB Delights in the Spotlight
Maya Rivers here, scribbling in the margins of celebrity sport and song—because sometimes a name drop feels like a sonnet and sometimes it is just a very polite shoutout.
A pop icon casually mentioned a Detroit Lions quarterback on a hit podcast and the internet did a slow, delighted clap. On August 13, during her two-hour sit-down on New Heights with Travis Kelce and Jason Kelce, Taylor Swift admitted she once imagined football as a stage where opposing offensive stars simply sized each other up before colliding in gladiatorial fashion. In that charming visual she name-checked Jared Goff and Josh Allen, saying she thought, in her earliest fandom confusion, that “Jared Goff is here and Josh Allen’s here,” then they blow a whistle and go at each other. The comment, replayed and reported by major outlets, set off a flurry of texts for Goff and prompted his playful, grateful response at a press conference on August 14. “That was a crazy couple hours last night for me and my phone,” Goff told reporters, laughing about the unexpected buzz. “It was like, ‘Oh!’ Yeah, kind of cool.”
There is poetry in the small, human missteps of superstars and athletes. Swift’s revelation came amid an amiable confession of ignorance—her early, blank-slate understanding of football before dating Travis Kelce—and the anecdote revealed less about sport and more about curiosity and the process of falling for someone’s world. She even asked what it was like when the Kansas City Chiefs played the Philadelphia Eagles in the 2023 Super Bowl, imagining her now-boyfriend Travis standing mere feet from his brother Jason across the field. Both Kelce brothers, and later Swift herself, corrected the notion: Travis is a tight end, Jason was a center, and they were not face-to-face warriors in that game. The slip was human, funny, and entirely endearing.
Travis Kelce, for his part, praised Swift’s effort to learn the sport, telling her on the podcast that he is “forever thankful for you diving into the football world wholeheartedly.” Swift admitted she has become “obsessed with it,” a tidy evolution from a fan who once thought opposing quarterbacks met midfield to duke it out. The couple’s origin story was also revisited: Travis had confessed his regret on a prior New Heights episode about failing to deliver a friendship bracelet with his number at a 2023 Eras Tour show. Swift joked that he didn’t even contact her management and that she has “never seen the original” bracelet. He blamed his own wounded pride for not staying to sort it out.
Back in Detroit, Goff’s circle was amused and delighted by the shoutout. He kept things light and clearly pleased, which is exactly the tone fans want when celebrity culture brushes up against professional sport: amused, human, and a little dazzled. The interaction also underscores how pop culture and football now orbit one another. Swift’s high-profile attendance at games and candid podcast confessions have done for NFL fandom what a catchy chorus does for a stadium anthem: they draw attention, create memes, and send phones buzzing.
Taylor’s mention of Jared Goff was not a scandal, more a gentle collision of two public lives that rarely intersect so directly. Yet it produced those small ripples of modern celebrity: press conferences peppered with questions about a pop star’s offhand remark, social feeds lighting up, and a quarterback smiling as his phone buzzes. It is evidence that in this era, a name on a podcast can become a moment in a player’s season and a footnote in a singer’s love story.
So what next? Will Swift keep deepening her playbook knowledge and possibly drop more athlete names as cultural bookmarks? Will Goff reference the mention on social media or use it as a lighthearted media moment in future interviews? We wait with a bemused grin, pens poised.
And so, the small drama subsides into a pleasant footnote, for now.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and E! Online, New Heights podcast
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
