During her New Heights debut, Taylor Swift proved that she’s gone from knowing nothing about football to an NFL superfan in the past two years when she name-dropped Jared Goff. And during a press conference Thursday (Aug. 14), the Detroit Lions quarterback shared his reaction to the shout-out.
While speaking to reporters at team training camp, Goff played it cool when asked what he thought about the pop star mentioning him on the podcast. “Yeah, pretty crazy,” he said. “Very cool, I guess.”
“Yeah, that was a crazy couple of hours last night for me and my phone,” he continued, miming how he was surprised to check his phone and find it blowing up with messages. “I was like, ‘Woah!’ Yeah, kind of cool.”
The QB’s remarks come one day after the New Heights episode in question dropped. While discussing her newfound passion for football with boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother, Jason Kelce, on the show, Swift shared that she used to be so oblivious to the rules of the sport, she previously thought that all of the positions on each team — regardless of offense or defense — played on the field the entire game.
“I thought it was like, Jared Goff is here and Josh Allen is here, and they blow a whistle, and they go at each other,” said the 14-time Grammy winner at the time, laughing. “I didn’t know what a first down was — I didn’t know what chains were.”
Since beginning her romance with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end in 2023, however, Swift has transformed into a full-fledged NFL geek. “I became a person who was running through the halls of my house screaming, ‘We drafted Xavier Worthy!’” she added on the podcast. “My friends are like, ‘Who body-snatched you? What do you mean?’”
Football was just one of several topics covered during Swift’s appearance on New Heights. Sitting next to Travis, the musician dived into everything from her thoughts on life post-Eras Tour to reclaiming her masters and taking care of her dad, Scott Swift, after his heart surgery. She also shared a litany of details about her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, which arrives Oct. 3 and will follow 2024’s 17-week Billboard 200-topper The Tortured Poets Department.
“[The album is] a lot more upbeat, and it’s a lot more fun pop excitement,” Swift said on the podcast of the project, which she noted is about “what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life” during her two-year Eras Tour. “My main goals were melodies that were so infectious, you’re almost angry at it.”
Watch Jared Goff react to Swift’s shout-out below.