Forget Travis Kelce: If Taylor Swift Were an NFL Player, She’d Be Tom Brady
The Messenger quantified how successful pop music's biggest star would be if she were an NFL player. To Swifties, the answer will not be surprising.
(co-byline: Daniela Perez / The Messenger)
The NFL’s Week 3 wasn’t defined by the Dolphins beating the Broncos by 50 points or the Cardinals upsetting the Cowboys. International popstar Taylor Swift appeared at Arrowhead Stadium to support Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’ star tight end, causing a popular uproar and social media storm that has reached unparalleled heights.
While one side of the internet incessantly refreshes their Twitter feeds awaiting the latest news about the rumored “It” couple, another furiously engages in the debate of which lovebird is better at their craft than the other. There is no real way to compare a 12-time Grammy award-winning artist to an eight-time Pro Bowl selection — except, perhaps, by quantifying Swift’s success through numbers relevant to the league that has embraced her. This poses the question: if Taylor Swift were an NFL player, how good would she be?
To roughly compare Swift with her NFL equivalents, we decided to construct a musical version of Pro-Football-Reference’s Approximate Value (AV) metric, which puts a single number on each player’s performance each season and allows us to compare across positions and history. For Swift, we considered each studio album to be a “season” — not including the re-recordings, which aren’t complete yet — and found its AV equivalent according to two different measures: Total sales, where Swift has sold over 75,699,207 albums worldwide in her career, and critical acclaim, according to Metacritic’s album scores. Swift’s percentile rank in each (relative to other albums since her self-titled debut in 2006) was mapped onto its equivalent AV among skill-position players since 2006, and the two values were averaged to capture both the commercial and the critical perspective on Swift’s work.
With a 14.8 average AV per "season" over 10 seasons, Swift is clearly more successful at this stage of her career than Kelce, who only has 10.0 AV per season in his 10-year career despite being widely considered one of the greatest tight ends to play the game. (Even if we remove Kelce’s first season, when he played just one game, his average per year is still just 11.1.) While Kelce has been named either first- or second-team All-Pro at tight end for seven consecutive seasons (and counting), Swift has all of those aforementioned Grammys and had 10 consecutive albums reach platinum certification (and counting).
Rather than comparing her with her rumored beau, we can expand the search for Swift comps — for instance, her AV equivalent tally of 148 in 10 “seasons” is almost exactly the same as Barry Sanders’s 10-season NFL total (149). Sanders is frequently regarded as the greatest running back of all time.
Other Hall of Famers with roughly the same amount of AV as Swift’s hypothetical equivalent number include defenders Warren Sapp, Ronde Barber and Zach Thomas, lineman Willie Roaf, and even Kelce’s precursor as Kansas City’s superstar tight end, Tony Gonzalez. Note as well that those are full-career numbers, and Swift probably has many years to go in a career that only seems to be hitting its stride right now.
That’s why we think the best comparison of all for Swift is another GOAT: Tom Brady.
Through Brady’s first 10 full seasons as New England’s starting QB, he had 160 AV, not too far ahead of Swift’s equivalent tally. And like Swift, Brady’s career went through many distinct eras.
Early on, Brady was the wunderkind who won 10 consecutive playoff games — including three Super Bowls — to start his career, but his individual stats were surprisingly average. His adjusted net YPA, for instance, was only 9% above league average through his first six seasons as a starter. This mirrors Swift’s early stretch of albums that were commercial smashes but often carried subpar critical marks; her average album’s Metascore through Reputation — the sixth studio release of her career — was just 73.5, or 6% worse than average. (Yes, Metacritic scores are grossly inflated.)
But just as Brady underwent a startling mid-career evolution from a QB with solid but unspectacular numbers to a statistical monster — he has pretty much all the passing records now — and thus caught up to his pre-existing status as a big-game winner, the critical opinion of Swift’s music has evolved to match her huge sales figures. When 2019’s Lover earned a Metascore of 79, it was the best-reviewed album of Swift’s career to that point; she then followed that up with three albums — Folklore, Evermore and Midnights — that each scored 85 or higher in Metacritic’s grades, all placing among the top 5% of albums in their database. This is reflected in her equivalent AV scores above: Early on, they were being carried by sales and not critics’ scores. Now she is putting up All-Pro stats in both categories.
And like Brady, she has been involved in high-profile rivalries that have brought out some of the best work in each star’s respective crafts. Most notably, Brady’s rivalry with Peyton Manning at the peak of their careers dominated the 2000s and 2010s. From them, fans enjoyed 17 meetings, intense jawing and sparring over who was the league’s best quarterback. Highlights include Brady's Pats stomping Manning's Colts in the 2004 season’s AFC championship before winning his third Super Bowl, and the 2006 season’s AFC championship, where Manning stormed back from a 21-3 first-half deficit to defeat Brady and reach for his first Super Bowl ring.
The two have since become friendly, but Brady has surpassed Manning in nearly every career record and retired as the NFL’s most decorated player. The infamous Brady-Manning feud brings to mind Swift’s rivalry with 2010s pop sensation Katy Perry. Fans received cult classic “Bad Blood” as a result of the feud — and there is not much debate over whose career will survive the test of time.
We do not wish to subject any NFL player to a Jake Gyllenhaal or John Mayer comparison, though we both agree “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” is Taylor’s Super Bowl LV (Tom proves he’s still got it without Belichick!) and “Dear John” is going back-to-back with the Super Bowl XXXIX win (the beginning of the Patriots dynasty!).
But of course, there is no way to quantify Swift’s six concert tours because there is no NFL equivalent. Her ongoing The Eras Tour — which is expected to draw $2.2 billion in North American ticket sales according to TIME — is a three-and-a-half-hour, 44-song epic that has 146 dates on the calendar in five continents. And there is no way to quantify Swift’s three released re-recordings because NFL teams cannot re-play games. (No doubt Brady would like to “re-record” that throw to Wes Welker in Super Bowl XLVI.) They are feats accomplished solely by one person and are not propped up by the name on a jersey.
Surely if we could, Swift’s numbers would perhaps reach heights no NFL player has ever seen — and will never see. (That is, until the Chicago Bears do a sequel to the “Super Bowl Shuffle” and Terry Bradshaw releases another country album.) Or, maybe, Kelce can just record a duet with Swift — he seems to have the stage presence of a pop star, if not the singing voice. For now, we’re just happy to watch as they drive away into the sunset in their getaway car.
Filed under: NFL