Nine months ago, plenty of people around the league thought Travis Kelce might be done. He was 36, had started acting the previous summer and was engaged to Taylor Swift. With three Super Bowl rings and every major Chiefs receiving record already on his résumé, it was easy to picture the end.
Kelce didn’t see it that way. The Chiefs’ 6-11 season was not the kind of finish he wanted, so he came back for his 14th season - and the production has kept rolling.
Through six games, Kelce has been a central piece of a Chiefs team sitting at 5-1. He leads Kansas City with 343 receiving yards and shares the team lead with Xavier Worthy with 24 catches. Along the way, he’s also stacked up more history.
In Sunday night’s loss to the Seahawks, Kelce passed Tony Gonzalez for the most receiving yards by a tight end, including the postseason. He also jumped Marvin Harrison and Cris Carter on the all-time receptions list, moving to No. 5 overall.
Still, the milestone came with a loss, and Kelce made clear that the team result is what matters most.
“ It’s fun stuff, ” Kelce said in the latest “New Heights” podcast episode. “It’s pretty cool.
It’s pretty cool stuff to be a part of that. We’ve said it over the past, probably year, I’ve been in just the discussions of being a top 10 in the receptions and top five in terms of yards and stuff like that.
But all that (stuff) is hoopla, man. If you’re not winning football games, man, that (stuff’s) pointless, man.
“It’s such a team game. The individual stuff is just, it’s cool to look at, but at the same time, if I don’t have Andy Reid dialing these things up, if I don’t have great teammates holding each other accountable, there’s no success at all.
So it’s just (being) very appreciative of the situation I’ve been in, and shout out to the guys that have done it before me, like a Tony Gonzalez and like a Marvin Harrison and Cris Carter. That makes it that much more of an honor to be in the conversations with them.”
NFL Films marked the occasion with a tribute video for Kelce, celebrating the record he just reached.
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For the Chiefs, the fit is easy to understand. They know Brown, they know what he can do when healthy, and they have a history of turning to players who already understand the system. The question is whether Philadelphia decides to move him at all, and if it does, how much of a return it would take to make a deal worth doing for a receiver whose recent production has been muted. [Read more 🡒]