THE RUNDOWN
- On Monday, Taylor Swift stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and revealed why she’s not doing the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.
- She explained that there have been informal talks, but her relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce and being too “locked in” during games influenced her decision.
- Off the field, the couple is planning their wedding and celebrating the release of Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl.
In an October 6 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Taylor Swift revealed why she won’t headline the Super Bowl halftime show.
When the host asked whether she had turned down a formal Super Bowl offer over the rights to performance footage—referring to rumors that circulated online—she responded: “No. Well, here’s the thing, Jay-Z has always been very good to me. Our teams are very close,” she said, noting that there’s been communication between her camp and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company, which works with the NFL on the Super Bowl’s halftime production. But she emphasized that nothing ever got to the point of a real contract. “They sometimes will call and say, ‘How does she feel about the Super Bowl?’ and that’s not an official offer or a conference-room conversation,” she explained.
So why pass? Swift turned the spotlight to her fiancé, Travis Kelce. Calling football “violent chess” and “gladiators without swords,” she described the emotional intensity of watching Kelce put “his life on the line” and how strange it would be to perform on his turf.
“The whole season I am locked in on what that man is doing on the field,” she said, adding that football is a “very dangerous, very high-pressure, high-intensity sport.” She joked about trying to plan elaborate choreography in her head while he’s making plays: “I think we should do two verses of ‘Shake It Off’ into ‘Blank Space’ into ‘Cruel Summer’—would be great.” She added that the decision has “nothing to do with Travis,” saying, “He would love for me to do it. I’m just too locked in.”
Off the field, Swift and Kelce are in the process of planning their wedding after the Kansas City Chiefs player proposed to the singer in August. “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married 🧨,” they wrote in a joint Instagram post announcing their engagement. The couple has been together since summer 2023.
Swift, who just released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, previously appeared on Kelce’s New Heights podcast and opened up about the public perception of their romance.
“We don’t really [pay attention to the chatter about our relationship],” she said. “I don’t see a lot of things.” She continued, saying that reading “feedback from the internet” and comments can make it easy to “internalize” outside noise, but she’s learned to tune it out. “I’ve been in the music industry for 20 years,” she said. “It’s pretty hard to hurt my feelings at this point.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.elle.com ’
