NEW ORLEANS — On Fridays, Travis Kelce wanders.
Before games, as the Kansas City Chiefs go through their practice protocol — 10 plays for the offense against the scout-team defense, and vice-versa — Kelce is a man unto himself, locked into the task at hand and transfixed during what would otherwise be dead periods. When it’s the first-team defense’s turn, while the rest of his offensive teammates watch from the sideline, Kelce roams onto an adjacent field and enters his own realm. He paces and stutter-steps, cutting in and out of imaginary breaks, running through plays in his head while talking to himself.
No one disturbs him. No one questions him. In the Chiefs’ inner sanctum, it’s merely an accepted fact that one of the NFL’s most accomplished players is also one of the sport’s most serious dudes when it comes to preparing for battle.
Mentally, coaches and teammates don’t know where Kelce goes in those moments. They just know he’s very much at home.
“Trav is a guy that, you can tell, he’s always in his own zone,” veteran receiver DeAndre Hopkins, who the Chiefs acquired in a trade with the Tennessee Titans last October, told me Wednesday. “He’s always locked in at practice. He takes everything seriously. How he practices, and how he goes about his day is incredible to see.”
This is the Travis Kelce the rest of the world doesn’t see, the onetime screwup who has matured as a man, become obsessive about his craft and wants to keep doing it at a high level for as long as it’s athletically viable. The 35-year-old tight end has a chance to earn his fourth Super Bowl ring on Sunday, when the Chiefs face the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX, and add to his future first-ballot Hall of Fame resume.
He has many good reasons to call it a career, including broadcast stardom, a slew of acting opportunities and a hot-and-heavy romance with singer Taylor Swift, perhaps the world’s biggest celebrity. Yet Kelce’s intention — win or lose, as reiterated during the Chiefs’ media session at their New Orleans hotel Wednesday morning — is to keep playing the sport he reveres, on his terms.
“I want to play as long as I can play,” Kelce said.
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Two days earlier, Kelce expressed a similar sentiment, telling reporters, “It’s months like these that make me feel like I can play forever. I’ve still got a lot of football left in me.”
As Kelce’s fame has grown — at first due to the highly popular “New Heights” podcast he co-hosts with his brother, recently retired Eagles center Jason; and then, exponentially, once he and Swift became an item early in the 2023 season — his workplace has become his protective cocoon, an environment where he can be a leader and tone-setter and also have the freedom to prepare in his own, idiosyncratic manner.
The football field is a cocoon for Travis Kelce, away from the spotlight of starring for a football dynasty and dating pop megastar Taylor Swift. (Mark J. Rebilas / Imagn Images)
One of only 14 players, and three tight ends, to have recorded more than 1,000 career receptions, Kelce will go down as an all-time great. Many players in his age bracket regularly take days off, in training camp and during the season, but Kelce refuses to do either. Even when Kansas City coach Andy Reid or his assistants suggest scaling back his reps in a given practice, Kelce pushes back.
“He’s getting older, and so we’re trying to cut back some of his reps, and he won’t do it,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said Tuesday. “He gets mad at you if you take him out of practice. And that bleeds into the entire team. Whenever you’re tired and whenever you’re not wanting to take a practice seriously or take a rep seriously, you look at him and he’s going full speed, scoring touchdowns after every catch, and it motivates you to take your game up to another level.”
Kelce’s motivational magic was on full display in the Chiefs’ 32-29 AFC Championship Game victory over the Buffalo Bills. Early in the game, second-year punt returner Nikko Remigio called for a fair catch despite having some room between him and the Bills players charging toward him. Remigio later told FanDuel TV’s Kay Adams that Kelce approached him on the sideline and said, “That’s not being great, bro.”
On his next return opportunity, in the second quarter, Remigio raced 41 yards, setting up a touchdown that gave Kansas City a 21-10 lead. Said Remigio: “He was the first one to greet me coming to the sideline, and he was like, ‘That’s how you be great, dog!’ And I was like, this is a dream.”
Teammates and coaches say that Kelce is often the first and most vocal person to greet new acquisitions, even when they’re relatively anonymous practice-squad signees. He clearly relishes his role as an organizational standard-bearer, especially in light of the way he began his career, and how far he has come in terms of his professionalism.
Once infamously suspended from the University of Cincinnati football team for an entire season after failing a marijuana test, Kelce still had some rough edges when he arrived in Kansas City as a third-round pick in the 2013 draft. Early in his career, he made an obscene gesture that Reid called “an immature act” during a “Sunday Night Football” defeat to the Denver Broncos. He has since described himself as having been selfish, stat-obsessed and overly casual in his work ethic.
When Kelce was asked on Wednesday how different his approach is now than it was in his first few seasons, he shook his head and said, “It’s night-and-day different. I was a lot more focused on individual success and, you know, what comes with having the individual success is being able to be comfortable in who I am, and confident in who I am.
“And I think with that individual success, I’ve started to really understand what’s real — and what’s real is this game’s only fun if you win football games with the people around you. And once I figured that out, it really just took off for me, and I’ve loved playing in the league ever since, man.”
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This is not to say that Kelce’s fire has disappeared. Remember his celebrated confrontation with Reid during the second quarter of last February’s thrilling Super Bowl LVIII victory over the San Francisco 49ers? Kelce, removed from the game on a pivotal red-zone play that resulted in a Chiefs fumble, was irate when he came to the sideline and bumped up against Reid, nearly knocking over the then-65-year-old coach.
While quarreling with the perception that he pushed Reid, Kelce’s recollection is not a pleasant one.
“A push is a bit of an exaggeration,” Kelce said. “I would never push my coach like that. I was fired up, though, and Coach Reid knows I get fired up, and sometimes he gets fired up the same way to get me going. And at that point in the game, I just wanted to let him know, ‘You can put it on me, man. I’m ready for it.’ I was pretty heated in that moment. I know I can’t catch him off guard like that to where he stumbles.”
Three weeks ago, Kelce caught some fans off guard in the Chiefs’ playoff opener, catching seven passes for 117 yards and a touchdown in a 23-14 divisional-round victory over the Houston Texans. On some plays, including a 49-yard catch-and-run to the Houston 1-yard line in the second quarter, the tight end evoked images of his physical prime.
After a somewhat ho-hum regular season, Travis Kelce has again turned it on in the playoffs. (Mark J. Rebilas / Imagn Images)
At times during what for him was a relatively tame regular season (97 catches, 823 yards, 8.5 yards per catch, three touchdowns), Kelce appeared to be visibly slowing down, to the point where some wondered whether the end of his time with the Chiefs might not be voluntary. His performance in the Texans game shredded that storyline, but few premier pass catchers have thrived into their late 30s, and Kelce knows that nothing is promised.
Because of that, he’s savoring every second of his team’s quest to become the first to win three consecutive Super Bowls.
“It’s such a special time in Chiefs history, and this legacy is just so fun to be a part of, because of the people that we have here,” he said Wednesday. “And I’m just trying to cherish all these memories and make the most out of all these opportunities that we have chasing these rings.”
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As he tries to add to his gaudy postseason profile and hoist another Lombardi Trophy, Kelce is experiencing excitement for the players around him, especially those newcomers who have yet to be part of a championship run.
“I think at this point, I just want this Super Bowl even more so for the guys around me than I do myself,” he said. “It’s just where I’m at in my career, and I feel like I’m a lot more selfless nowadays than I was early on. This team is more special than any I’ve ever been on.
“You know, I used to want to be known as the greatest tight end ever, but I think it’s just more so enjoying these moments that I have with my teammates and trying to get these wins and create these memories. I’ve gotten away from wanting to be known as that. I think I want to be known as just one of the best teammates these guys have ever had.”
Kelce will, because his energy is infectious — and because on any given day at the facility, and especially on Fridays, it’s very, very obvious how much he cares.
He’s not ready to walk away from the game he loves. But know this: On Friday at Tulane University, when it’s the first-team defense’s turn to run through its plays, Kelce will wander off and enter his distinctive, rambling realm, and no one in his presence will say a word.
(Top illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; photo: Brooke Sutton / Getty Images)
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