Stephen A. Smith thinks everyone needs to calm down.
The ESPN commentator is standing by Taylor Swift as NFL fans — and Golden Globes host Joe Koy — continue to criticize her for attending boyfriend Travis Kelce’s football games.
“I have to take a moment to come to the defense of Taylor Swift,” Smith said on the Jan. 10 episode of “First Take.” “Everybody is sitting up there and acting like she’s some kind of impediment and, excuse me, she did her job! That Eras Tour? Off the chain.”
“She’s going to support her dude,” the ESPN star, 56, continued. “To show up at a football game and the cameras are on her — that ain’t her fault!”
Smith, who attended one of Swift’s “phenomenal” Eras Tour concerts over the summer, also noted that the 12-time Grammy winner didn’t start going to Kansas City Chiefs games until near the end of her 2023 tour.
“And excuse me, by the way, she went to the games after the concerts,” he continued. “It’s not like she used the games to bump up the concerts. Oh no! Those kids were going to her concerts whether the NFL was promoting her or not!”
“Taylor Swift is that girl. Let’s show some respect,” he concluded. “She probably is gonna have a positive on Travis Kelce’s performance, okay?”
The Missouri-based team has won six of the nine games that Swift, 34, has attended since she and Kelce went public with their romance in September.
In fact, at the beginning of the season, Swift was praised by NFL fans after Kelce started playing better than ever with her in attendance.
During the Chiefs’ game against the Los Angeles Chargers in October, CBS even aired a graphic that showed that Kelce was averaging double the amount of yards per game when Swift was in the stands.
Yet as the season went on, NFL fans were quick to change their tune as the Chiefs’ offense started to struggle, with several fans — and even commentators — comparing the “Man” singer to Yoko Ono and blasting the NFL for showing her on TV too much.
Following the backlash over her airtime, the “Anti-Hero” singer told Time that she is “just there to support Travis” and has no control over how often she is shown.
“I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in,” she explained. “There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when the camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once.”
“I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads,” she added.
Chiefs legend Christian Okoye also defended the pop star against the unwarranted criticism, saying that Swift has “nothing to do” with the team’s uncharacteristic number of losses this year.
“Taylor Swift is not on the field,” the former Chiefs running back, who played for the team from 1987 to 1992, recently told TMZ Sports.
“When you’re doing bad, people have to find excuses and they have to point fingers, especially those who don’t like the situation about Taylor Swift and Travis Kielce,” he noted. “Those people are pointing fingers and making it up right now. I have to tell you, they’re wrong.”
