As we discussed, Taylor Swift was in Kansas City for New Year’s – she attended the Chiefs game at Arrowhead on NYE, then Taylor and Travis Kelce went to a big party that night. People at the party were taking photos and videos, and that’s how we know that Taylor and Travis kissed at midnight (which will absolutely make its way into a song). According to obsessive Swifties who studied the videos from the NYE party, Travis also said “I love you” to Taylor at or around midnight. I mean… they’ve been dating for five or six months. I suspect that they’ve already said “I love you” many times to each other.

Anyway, if all of this is enjoyable to you or you find yourself wondering about Travis’s rapid ubiquity, wonder no more – the New York Times has done a fascinating piece about Travis’s two business managers, brothers Andre and Aaron Eanes, and how these three have been planning out Travis’s cultural rise for years.

In the only recent year in which Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs weren’t playing in the Super Bowl, the N.F.L. star was driving around Los Angeles in early February with his business managers, André and Aaron Eanes, marveling at billboards featuring Dwayne Johnson, the actor and entertainer better known as the Rock. “Man, I don’t think I’ll ever be as famous as the Rock,” Mr. Kelce said. His co-managers looked at each other. “We’re like, Yes, you can,” André Eanes said.

The Chiefs have spent the last few years as the most unstoppable force in football and, along the way, Mr. Kelce’s other team has grown to include a creative strategist, a community outreach coordinator, a Los Angeles-based publicist, a personal chef and a trainer. He has four football agents, led by Mike Simon at VMG. In the spring, he also became a client of Creative Artists Agency to feed his budding acting itch.

The Eanes brothers coordinate it all, managing the surging flow of incoming traffic for a piece of Kelce Inc. Film scripts have been shared among the team. Game shows are a consideration. Maybe a few less commercials.

“People say to me, ‘Man, it’s been a crazy year,’” Aaron Eanes said. “When I say, ‘Actually, it’s not that crazy,’ people look at me funny. It’s because it’s easy when you have a plan. We’re executing that plan.”

Before you run to YouTube and TikTok to research conspiracy theories, no, the plan did not include Taylor Swift. But while Mr. Kelce’s shift into a more mainstream form of celebrity was planned out before he met Ms. Swift, there is no question that the doubling of his prospective audience — from mostly men between the ages of 18 and 49 to a far larger group bolstered heavily by Ms. Swift’s female fans of all ages — has changed the calculus for where the plan goes from here.

“The awareness of Travis is much larger and with an even broader audience,” said Richard Lovett, C.A.A.’s co-chairman. “It’s accelerated that which was probably inevitable in terms of his level of awareness and appeal.”

[From The NY Times]

I’m not a Traylor Hater, but I am a Traylor Conspiracist. I think Travis genuinely likes and maybe even loves Taylor Swift. But I also think that the way everything worked out between them was a bit too convenient. I mean, Travis saw his opening and he took it. He’s played it perfectly too – enjoying Taylor’s fame, supporting her, speaking her love language of demonstrative drama. Do I think this was all some scheme hatched in his business manager’s office? No. But I do think that Travis and his team all quickly realized how they could and would play all of this.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Instagram.