Take a look at this:

I’m trying to understand the anti-Taylor Swift take. It seems like people are annoyed with her presence in general, or feel like she’s some sort of distraction to the game itself. They’re sick of hearing about her.

But when you watch the actual game broadcasts, she’s on television for a negligible amount of time. They really do not cut away to the box with any kind of frequency. It’s not anything that anyone would consider egregious, as Pompliano and Reddit user JPAnalyst point out. I’ve watched a couple of the games where Taylor Swift was in attendance and not once did I think to myself “man I wish they’d stop showing her.” I didn’t miss any game action and I didn’t feel like Taylor was being forced upon me.

Colin Cowherd did an entire segment on this topic the other day. It runs about five minutes but this portion of it I think hits the nail on the head:

“Did you know statistically, in a three-and-a-half hour NFL playoff broadcast, or regular season broadcast, just 18 minutes are actual football? We have the data, we have the numbers. You don’t turn away. There’s coach cutaways, they show fans in Buffalo on fire, commercials, reviews – 18 minutes of football, for the record, about the length of five Taylor Swift songs.”

This is a great point. Do you realize how much horse shit we are subjected to during a regular NFL game? We have advertisements shoved down our throats, useless in-game interviews, cutaways of some guy making a cheesesteak, or the Philadelphia Art Museum steps. We are regularly shown banal, non-football content during these games. 44 seconds of Taylor Swift, in my mind, is preferable to seeing some guy serving chili during a Bengals tailgate.

The other thing that’s comical is the idea that Swift is some sort of distraction to the team. The Chiefs are in the Super Bowl. Travis Kelce has 262 yards and three touchdowns this postseason. It reminds me a bit of when David Beckham started dating a Spice Girl in 1997. You definitely had fat slob Manchester United fans who thought he was being a wanker, but it changed absolutely nothing on the field. Beckham had something like 30 goals and 40 assists between 1997 and 1999, when he and Posh got married, and United was throttling teams every week. They won the Premier League, FA Cup, and Champions League in that time frame, so no, the addition of the fancy pop star did not affect anything,

Case in point, this is all overblown. If they taped our eyelids to our foreheads and made us watch Taylor Swift, like it was some sort of military interrogation program, then we’d have something to complain about. But that’s not what this is.