Kelly Stafford credits Taylor Swift’s connection to football for helping her grow her podcasting empire.
During a discussion with singer and actress Jana Kramer on the Sunday, November 17, episode of her “Whine Down” podcast, Stafford said the football-themed episodes of her own show, called “Timeout,” blossomed due to Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce.
“The ‘Timeout’ is literally thanks to Taylor Swift because she’s gotten a lot of women into football,” Stafford explained.
Stafford releases two episodes of her podcast “The Morning After” weekly, with the Tuesday “Timeout” episodes focused on football and teaching listeners the basics of the game.
“As I’m doing this, I’m realizing how much I don’t know,” said Stafford, who is married to Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford.
She added, “It’s a lot tougher than I thought to know the ins and outs. I know the basics, which helps me watch it. But that’s what ‘Timeout’ is. It’s basically learning the basics so people can enjoy it more when they’re watching it with their significant others.”
Kelly launched “The Morning After” in 2021, shortly after her husband was traded to the Rams after spending the first 12 seasons of his NFL career with the Detroit Lions. The couple, who got married in April 2015, share four daughters: twins Sawyer and Chandler, 7, Hunter, 6, and Tyler, 4.
“I was really tired and really down on myself on a lot of things — as a parent, as a wife, with my looks,” Stafford said about that period in her life.
Kelly explained how she saw the podcast as a vehicle to embrace the chaos of modern-day motherhood and relationships.
“I just wanted to create a space where we talk about not all of our best things,” she told Kramer, 40. “Maybe we mix it up and talk about some of our failures so that we don’t feel so alone when we do fail.”
On the topic of Swift, 34, Stafford recently got honest about how she struggled with the overwhelming amount of attention the pop star’s relationship with Kelce, 35, received in its early days.
“I will say, I kind of got tired of the Chiefs’ coverage of it, actually the NFL’s coverage, of this budding relationship last year,” Kelly said on the October 30 episode of “The Morning After.”
She added, “It was a good business decision for the NFL, but I almost felt like it was outshining the games. That’s what bothered me. I was a little jealous of the fact that they were getting all this attention and all of a sudden the football game was the sideshow. So yeah, maybe I let jealousy get the best of me.”
Whatever complicated feelings Kelly once had about Swift went out the window this Halloween when she dressed up as the singer for the holiday just days after surprising her daughters with a trip to see the Eras Tour in New Orleans.
