Whether you love it or hate it, the Taylor Swift effect on the Kansas City Chiefs certainly has brought a new audience to the NFL, but according to one football Hall of Famer, it's the reason why the league is losing fans.
Hall of Fame former coach Tony Dungy is at the 2024 Hula Bowl in Orlando as he is being inducted into the Hula Bowl Hall of Fame. Leading up to the game, Dungy was one of several former football stars interviewed by Fox News, and was asked about a poll that showed less than 25% of Gen Z-ers consider themselves "avid sports fans." Fellow Hall of Famer Rod Woodson attributed the cause to the interest in sports betting, and there are more general fans rather than fans of teams, but Dungy went another route in his explanation of it.
"I think we'll always have sports in some form or fashion. Some people are disenchanted with it," Dungy said.
When asked about the Taylor Swift effect, Dungy said the megastar is an example of why people aren't that interest in the NFL.
"That's the thing that's disenchanting people with sports now," he said. "There's so much on the outside coming in. Entertainment value and different things that's taking away from what really happens on the field."
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While there have been some NFL fans that aren't pleased with how much Swift is shown whenever she's at Chiefs games to support Travis Kelce, it certainly hasn't affected the popularity of the sport.
The NFL has continued to dominate TV watching, with 82 NFL games in the top 100 telecasts of 2023. The league also saw its average viewership rise 17.9 million viewers, tied for the second-highest average since 1995.
If any evidence was needed for the Chiefs, Kansas City's Christmas Day game against the Las Vegas Raiders had an average audience of 29.2 million viewers, making it the most-watched Christmas Day NFL regular season game. The Nov. 22 game Kansas City had against the Philadelphia Eagles in a Super Bowl 57 rematch averaged 29.03 million. So if Dungy is worried about the popularity of the sport, it seems to be doing just fine at the moment.
