Taylor might break up with Travis Kelce, but women in football aren’t going anywhere.

(This column originally appeared in Jenni Carlson’s newsletter. Subscribe here).

Kansas City plays Baltimore in the AFC Championship game on Sunday.

Taylor Swift isn’t currently on tour.

You know what that means — lots of shots of TS during the TV broadcast.

And you know what that means — plenty of people will lose their minds over TS being on the TV broadcast.

The mega pop star and the vitriol she causes have become as much a part of NFL broadcasts as announcers everyone hates and goofy cartoon animations. (By the way, those two issues need to be topics for another day!)

I get why broadcasters show Swift, who of course is dating Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce. She’s one of the biggest personalities in the world right now. She is preparing to take her Eras Tour to Japan, Australia, France, Spain, England, Germany and a bunch of other places, and as big as the shows were in the United States, it looks like they’re going to be just as big in those other countries.

Swift is beloved by millions if not billions of people.

But when she pops up on people’s TV screens during NFL games, outrage follows.

Some have suggested she’s negatively impacting Kelce and Kansas City. Apparently, they missed the fact he had two touchdowns a week ago and the team is one win away from playing in another Super Bowl.

Others have said she’s just jumping on the bandwagon. Yes, because Taylor Swift needs to be validated by being part of a winner.

Give me a break.

Almost all of the bellyaching about Swift comes down to one thing: men who don’t want women encroaching on their football world. Those men see that world as a male-dominated space where men are front and center, where men are in control, where the only women who are allowed willing are cheerleaders and begrudgingly are sideline reporters.

But here’s the reality: the football world isn’t a man’s world.

Never has been, but in the past few years, the number of women involved has skyrocketed. 

An SSRS/Luker on Trends Sports Poll released last year indicated 47% of NFL fans are women. That was an uptick of about a percentage point from the year before, meaning if the trend continues, the NFL is slowly but surely marching toward a day where the fan split is 50-50 between men and women.

There are also more women involved in the games themselves. Assistant coaches. Officials. Front-office decision makers. 

Lots of men are OK with this. I know a bunch who are. 

But there’s a group who aren’t. They may well see that women are part of the football world when they go to a game or watch one at a sports bar or realize that some women in their lives are bigger fans than they are. And yet, something about seeing Taylor Swift on their TVs pushes them over the edge.

The existence of women in the football world is offputting to some. I speak from experience on this. Before OU played one year in the Orange Bowl, a few of us sitting in the same area of the press box needed some technical help. If memory serves, there was an issue with the internet. One of the techs who was sent to help looked at me and said something along the lines of, “Now, how did you get interested in football?”

He didn’t ask that of anyone else. None of my male counterparts were asked how they got interested in football. Just me.

Women are seen by some as interlopers in the football world.

If you wonder whether you are one of those people, let me ask you this: how did you feel about the recording artist being all over social media before the game, being shown during the game broadcast and even talked about by the announcers?

I’m not talking about Taylor Swift but rather Eminem.

The rapper has been featured prominently before and during and probably even after Detroit’s playoff games. If you didn’t feel the same way about seeing him as you felt about seeing Taylor Swift, you might want to ask yourself why.

Or if you were OK with the broadcast showing Kelce’s brother, Jason, celebrating his success much like Swift was — the only difference was, she kept all her clothes on — you might take time for a little introspection.

Even if Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce break up, women aren’t going away in football. 

You might not like it, but you’re going to have to get used to it.