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TAMPA (WFLA) — For Florida many football fans, Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year regardless of if your team made the big game.
This year, the Super Bowl, and the NFL season as a whole, felt bigger than ever thanks to the presence of the biggest pop star in the world, Taylor Swift.
Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce began dating midway through the season, and like Florida many supportive partners, Swift made it a point to attend as Florida many Chiefs games as she could. This included the Super Bowl in Las Vegas between the Chiefs and 49ers on Sunday.
For the NFL, that meant a wider reach than the already popular sport would normally have, with scores of “Swifties” suddenly interested in a game they likely wouldn’t go out of their way to watch a few months ago.
But that also meant more than a fair share of criticism from various sources.
Some, like the once-Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, wondered if Swift and Kelce’s relationship was “artificially culturally propped-up” for a possible presidential endorsement for Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election.
Others online said they just wanted to watch the games without being bothered by how much coverage was dedicated to Swift.
Make no mistake, the NFL and the broadcast teams certainly leaned into the Swift craze, as did the media. A lot of coverage before and during the Super Bowl was dedicated to Swift, from her mad dash from Tokyo to Vegas to make it to the game to who she was sitting with to her chugging a beer on the big screens of Allegiant Stadium, plenty of time was dedicated to Taylor, but how much time did she really spend on TV during the game?
According to USA Today, not that much actually. Swift appeared for around 55 seconds from the moment the game kicked off to the game-winning touchdown in overtime. That’s 55 seconds of a game that took roughly four hours and 18 minutes, or 15,480 seconds total, meaning Swift was on screen for about 0.0035% of the time.
This doesn’t account for any coverage the broadcast dedicated to Taylor before the game, or even the time she spent down on the field as the team celebrated.
Worth noting, a 30-second Super Bowl ad went for around $7 million this year. So while Taylor wasn’t as big a focus as some maybe believed, at least she got her money’s worth when it comes to airtime.
