Al Michaels Details Amazon's Taylor Swift Coverage Plans And the Keyword Is 'Moderation'

Taylor Swift will reportedly be in attendance when the Kansas City Chiefs host the Denver Broncos, and poor Al Michaels will have to deal with it.

The dude can't catch a break with these Thursday-night games.

Michaels is easily on the Mount Rushmore of play-by-play announcers, and considering he has been in the game as long as he has, he probably just wants to call the game, not eat vegetables, and then go home.

Unfortunately, for Al, an NFL telecast in 2023 involves an occasional onslaught of Swifties to satiate, and he and the team at Amazon can't ignore having one of the biggest stars in the world on hand and pretending to enjoy football and cheering on her rumored beau, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

So, he says they'll cover her... but in moderation.

“What we’re gonna do tonight, everything in moderation,” said Michaels told Sports Illustrated's Jimmy Traina. “Our crew talked about it this morning. You can’t make a sideshow the show. The vast majority of the audience are tuning in to watch a football game."

Well, Al Michales certainly gets it. Most of the folks tuning in (or in the case of Amazon Prime, logging in) to the game, aren't there to see Taylor Swift.

But, enough will and Michaels and Co. are aware of this.

"There are people, I don’t know how many, it could be a sizable number, but it’s certainly not a majority, that if you trained the camera on her all night long, they’d be satisfied with that. This is not what we’re doing to do."

“There might be an appropriate shot or a couple. I don’t know what the number is going to be. If Kelce scores six touchdowns, who the hell knows what we’re going to do. But for the most part, just in moderation. The game is still the important element here, by far. That’s our thought. After that, you sort of make it, one of my favorite words, farcical.”

It may not take much to turn the Chiefs-Broncos game into a farce, but having an iso-cam on Swift certainly wouldn't help the cause.

“Moderation. That’s our word,” he said. “Everything in moderation. What do you do at a certain point? ‘There she is.' O.K. Got it.”

And that, folks, is why Michaels is one of the greats. Get your shot of Taylor Swift feigning interest in whatever Donna Kelce is yammering about, but then it's right back to football.

Follow on X: @Matt_Reigle