The official start of the NFL regular season is almost upon is, which means another weekly tradition is also revving up once more. No, not pre-game tailgating. We’re talking about New Heights, the podcast co-hosted by brothers Travis Kelce and Jason Kelce. Travis is the tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, reigning Super Bowl champions for the second year in a row, and Jason is newly in his retirement era, having hung up his Philadelphia Eagles helmet at the end of last season for a new gig as an ESPN commentator.
Travis is also, of course, the partner of one Taylor Swift, who made their relationship public last fall by showing up at a Chiefs game and driving off into the sunset with Travis after their win. It’s a moment fans know well and remember fondly—including, it turns out, comedian Adam Sandler.
Sandler, who just released a new standup comedy special and recently revealed that Travis has a role in the upcoming Happy Gilmore 2, chatted with megafans Travis and Jason for nearly an hour on the season 3 premiere of the podcast, published Wednesday. While the brothers gushed over the Saturday Night Live alum and quoted lines from his movies, Travis sporting a white Happy Gilmore ballcap, Sandler revealed the one celebrity he gets nervous around, in a lifetime of rubbing elbows with Hollywood greats: Swift.
“Somebody asked me who do you get nervous around and I said I do get nervous around Taylor Swift because I don’t want to fucking blow it for my kids and say something stupid,” he said. “So I’m just like shit, she means so much to my fucking house, I gotta say the right thing here!”
“What a girl!” he said, continuing that “she means so much to our house.” Sandler brought his teenage daughters, Sadie and Sunny, to the premiere of Swift’s concert movie last year, and went on about the special place Swift and her music have in their family lore.
“Since the kids, I think I was shooting like Grownups or That’s My Boy or something in Massachusetts and the kids were little and we were listening to Taylor Swift and listening to every song,” he said. “It was one of the first times that you listen to every song on the record. When I was a kid, I think the Beatles you did that with, maybe Elton John, you do every tune. It’s not like three hits and then you go, ‘alright, let me skip.’
“Fucking Taylor in our house, every tune, they knew every word, I loved listening to her in the car, I love what she had to say, every message, every melody, just the production, how cool she was, what she meant to young girls, what she means to women, what she means to guys doing the right thing.”
As Travis, who has also been known to go on at length about how great he thinks Swift is, grinned and listened, Sandler had yet more to say.
“Throughout the years, Saturday Night Live, [she] saw the kids there, took her time, hung out with them,” he said. “And then at her premiere for the movie she talked to the kids and talked to them about their movie, they did this bat mitzvah movie and she talked to them about what she liked in it. She just floors my family.”
He said “she’s lifetime forever,” for the Sandler family, “along with the whole world, she just means so much.”
But that’s not all, Sandler and his family were just as incoherently psyched as a large portion of the internet when photos of Swift and Travis on their early-relationship New York City date night, when the duo stopped by SNL together for a surprise appearance. The man was so excited that he couldn’t finish a sentence while talking about it.
“You being together, you guys, your love–that first, when you guys first started dating was—my family, like, ‘YES, look how good they are together, look how he’s a gentleman and she’s having so much fun.’ Anytime Taylor’s laughing with you my whole fucking family is like high-fiving.”
Eventually, Travis had to cut him off, lest his heart swell to bursting. He deployed a time-honored subject-change technique: Ask about the dog.
“So good, man, you got me sweating,” he said, before insisting that Sandler summon his bulldog, Bagels, for a cameo.
While the brothers’ podcast has returned for the season with the same weekly format, bellows of “New neeeeeews!” and all, there’s one big behind-the-scenes change: The Kelces inked a three-year deal with Amazon-owned Wondery worth a reported nine figures. The company will have exclusive advertising sales and distribution rights for the show, which has only grown in popularity since Swift entered the picture, raising the show’s profile by proxy. The show will still be available on a wide range of podcast platforms, as well as YouTube, with bonuses like early episode access for paid Wondery subscribers. The show was named Podcast of the Year at 2024’s iHeartPodcast Awards.
To close out the premiere episode, Sandler couldn’t help but make Travis blush one more time in his sign-off.
“Say hi to your parents and both your families and tell Taylor we love her,” he said.