Taylor Swift Scored Another Defense From Within the Sports World

Whether you like it or not, 2023 was undeniably the year when Taylor Swift entered the NFL scene.

The pop star, of course, started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and quickly became a fixture at his games. That set off something of a chain reaction. Each weekend, the sports world would wait for her to arrive at the stadium. We'd then see reaction shots of Swift during the game before some follow-up stories emerged. Sometimes, they'd be about what she and Kelce had planned for the future; other times, there'd be a nugget about an in-stadium interaction.

Either way, Swift was unmissably present on the NFL landscape. And that didn't make everyone happy.

Football fans, for example, were initially upset about cutaways and references to someone who wasn't directly involved in the game. Those criticisms haven't let up, even though Swift's camera time has decreased over the season. The superstar also spoke to those sentiments, making her now-famous "Dads, Brads, and Chads" comment. And more recently, things have escalated into conspiracy theory territory.

While you might expect the sports world to be critical—hot takes are part of the talking-head landscape—there have been some notable Swift defenders. NBC's Mike Tirico spoke about the inclusive nature of showing her on NBC broadcasts, and ESPN's Stephen A. Smith said that it's not her fault that she was being shown.

Now, she has two more big-time sports names in her corner.

"I'm gonna look right in that camera. If you're screaming at [Taylor Swift] saying she ruined [football], you're just a loser," former NBA player and current analyst Charles Barkley said on CNN. "You're just a loser of a jackass. You could be A or B."

Bob Costas, a longtime NBC sportscaster who has called plenty of football during his career, also weighed in.

"You know what? When it comes to the Super Bowl, where a lot of people who don't watch football all year long double the audience even of the conference championship games, part of that is the halftime entertainment," he said.

He went on: "A huge part of it is the commercials. So for people, all of a sudden, because they don't like something about Taylor Swift—either they don't like the Chiefs or they've inferred that Taylor Swift might not be a Trumper, then they're annoyed by Taylor Swift. I can guarantee you that all this news on Fox News would not be happening if she was wearing a MAGA hat. They would love it."

Newsweek reached out to Fox News via email for comment on whether Swift's political affiliation affects the network's coverage.

But that wasn't the only big-time defense of Swift from within the sports world. On Wednesday, Colin Cowherd questioned why the pop star's presence was a problem while a male celebrity like Drake, Eminem or Jack Nicholson showing up wasn't an issue. The radio host, for his part, chalked it up to "really weird, lonely, insecure men."

"We celebrate all these goofballs jumping on tables in Buffalo and cheese hats and men and men and Matthew McConaughey and Drake and Jack Nicholson," Cowherd said. "Men and men and men and Eminem, and it's cool. And 'Can I get a selfie?' And 'I can't believe I saw...' And the young, attractive, beautiful, talented woman comes on for 25 seconds and you're bothered.

"Again, judge people by the silly things that bother them. This says nothing, this anger. This says nothing about Taylor Swift. It says everything about the men bothered by it," he said.

That clip was shared on X (formerly Twitter) and had received more than 2 million views by Friday morning.

With the Super Bowl rapidly approaching, one thing is safe to assume: We'll only get more Swift takes in the coming days.