Kelce Lately

With two Super Bowl rings, a star turn hosting snl, and charisma for miles, Travis Kelce could wind up in the broadcast booth-or on the big screen

- By Tom Kludt. Photographs by Nick Riley Bentham

Travis Kelce had a week off but work to do. Last fall, the Kansas City Chiefs star made his way to New York to pursue a dream he’s had since he was a kid in Ohio, when he stayed up late on weekends with his mom watching the likes of Chris Farley and Will Ferrell. Hosting Saturday Night Live, Kelce’s manager Aaron Eanes tells me, “was the only thing he ever said he wanted to do.”

He first visited his brother, Jason, in Philadelphia, before deciding to make the pilgrimage to 30 Rock two nights before Halloween, when Jack Harlow was guest hosting. “My brother always talks about how it’s a quick drive from Philly to New York,” Kelce recalls. “So I just said, you know what? I’m not doing anything, I’ll just get up and go.”

Kelce had been circling SNL for years. Eanes made inroads with producers in 2021, but after the Chiefs were blown out in the Super Bowl that year against Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the tight end’s hosting prospects were put on ice. He had done some scouting of his own and recognized another hurdle: Most of the recent NFL players to serve as hosts played the game’s marquee position. “There’s only been like maybe three or four guys that weren’t quarterbacks that ever got to actually host,” Kelce says. But the ultimate obstacle would be how the Chiefs finished the season; if Kelce were going to host, he was going to have to be a recently crowned champion. “If Aaron Rodgers won the Super Bowl,” Lorne Michaels says, “I would have been happy to have him.”