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Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrates with Taylor Swift.

The defending AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs now find themselves in serious danger of missing the playoffs altogether, after suffering a devastating defeat at the hands of the Denver Broncos last Sunday, 22-19 on a walk-off 35-yard field goal by Denver placekicker Wil Lutz.

The loss to the 9-2, AFC West-leading Broncos not only knocked the Chiefs — winners of three of the last six Super Bowls — to 5-5 but left them in the AFC’s ninth seed. Only seven will make the postseason, and the four teams directly above Kansas City all hold tiebreakers over the Chiefs.

Now, in Week 12, the Chiefs face the 8-2 Indianapolis Colts in a virtual must-win game. A loss would reduce Kansas City’s chances of qualifying for the postseason to a slim 38 percent, based on a mathematical model created by The Athletic.

Swift, Kelce Log Yet Another Achievement

But even as the Chiefs and their future Hall of Fame tight end Travis Kelce prepared for the crucial showdown with the Colts at Arrowhead Stadium this week, Kelce and his fiancée, global pop megastar Taylor Swift, reached yet another career milestone — along with Kelce’s brother, Jason Kelce, a retired offensive lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles.

In August, Swift made a guest appearance on the New Heights podcast, hosted by the Kelce brothers. Earlier this week, Apple released its list of the most listened-to podcast episodes of the year on the tech giant’s platform.

Coming in at No. 3, the “Taylor Swift Episode” of New Heights.

Kelce Brothers React to Honor

On this week’s episode of New Heights, the two Kelce co-hosts reacted to the honor.

“Our Taylor episode was named one of the best podcast episodes of 2025,” Jason Kelce said on the November 19 episode. “One of them? What is beating that one? Are there other ones up there? There’s nothing even coming close to that.”

The two podcast episodes listed by Apple above the Taylor Swift New Heights episode were an episode of The Telepathy Tapes, a podcast focusing on “the voices of non-speakers and the science of consciousness, connection, and communication.”

2 Episodes Leading Swift Podcast

The episode, coming in at No. 1, was titled, “Unveiling the Hidden World of Telepathic Communication in a Silenced Community.”

In second place, one step above Taylor Swift on New Heights, an episode of Crime Junkie — which as the name would imply is a true crime podcast — titled, “MURDERED: The Feeney Family.”

Apple did not announce exactly how many downloads the Taylor Swift podcast received, but in the three months that the video version has been online via YouTube, the episode has been viewed 24 million times.

Kelce Thanks Apple

“Thank you, Apple, for putting us up there, for doing pretty much nothing and just having the most famous person in the world hop on our show,” Jason Kelce said on the November 19 edition of New Heights.

“She’s just so magical,” said Travis Kelce of his fiancée, as quoted by Billboard magazine.

This week, the New Heights social media accounts raised Swift fans’ hopes that the 35-year-old “The Fate of Ophelia” songstress was about to make a repeat appearance, posting a graphic showing the silhouetted figures of two unidentified women.

As the Kelce brothers later revealed, however, the two guests turned out to be television sports reporters Charissa Thompson and Erin Andrews.

Jonathan Vankin JONATHAN VANKIN is an award-winning journalist and writer who now covers baseball and other sports for Heavy.com. He twice won New England Press Association awards for sports feature writing. He was a sports editor and writer at The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo, Japan, covering Japan Pro Baseball, boxing, sumo and other sports. More about Jonathan Vankin

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