HENDERSON, Nev. – Take your Super Bowl seats, class is in session.
Whether you want to characterize them as dean and professor, Jedi and Padawan, Big K and Little K, or just bros, Travis Kelce and George Kittle are continuing to take the tight end position to, well, new heights. Their teams, the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, respectively, are preparing to face off Sunday in Super Bowl 58 and, quarterbacks notwithstanding, the duo are as likely as any players to determine who wins the Lombardi Trophy while commanding much of the Las Vegas spotlight.
With a relationship forged from paying it forward and mutual rises from relative obscurity, Super Sunday could be a career apex – from a football perspective anyway – for Kelce and Kittle. USA TODAY Sports spent much of Super Bowl week digging into their games and relationship.
How Travis Kelce and George Kittle met
They first crossed paths in 2018, Kittle’s second year in the NFL, when he’d explode for 1,377 receiving yards – which set a single-season record for tight ends. (Kelce surpassed that mark two years later with 1,416.)
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“My relationship with Travis kinda started out from afar,” said Kittle, a fifth-round draft pick in 2017. “I watched his film when I was in college – like my senior year, I had to break down his film and talk about it with my tight end room in Iowa.
“And then I got an opportunity to meet him in 2018, and he was nothing but incredibly kind to me – traded jerseys with me, which was one of the coolest moments ever for me at that time. I remember an interview popped up, (and) I got asked, ‘What was the coolest thing that happened to me in 2018?’ I was like, ‘Well, Travis Kelce followed me back on Instagram.’ That was a big deal for me. Just for him to become a friend of mine, it’s been awesome.
“He’s my guy, he’s been fantastic.”
Kelce has also grown close with Kittle’s folks and once flew to Nashville simply to record a podcast with them.
“He’s been nothing but completely kind to me and my family, very generous with his time,” said Kittle.
Ironically, while Kittle was analyzing Kelce’s moves in college, Kelce was digging in on the Hawkeyes prospect as he became draft-eligible.
“I was actually asked about George Kittle in the (Chiefs) building when he was coming out,” said Kelce. “And I just watched him on film and was like, ‘This guy’s fun to watch.’ His energy, how he plays the game. You could tell by how he was giddy when he caught a ball. And he would get tackled, and the team rallied around him. You could tell he was loved in that locker room.
“And then on top of that, when I met him … he was just a down-to-earth kind of guy. And then you see the success, you see what he can do with the ball in his hands – all the explosive plays. It’s just kind of been a fun growing of a friendship and a brotherhood.
“It’s just an absolute honor, not only to go against him here, but to know who he is and what he stands for as a man and as a family man. I got all the respect for the guy.”
Tight End University
Kittle has done his offseason work in Nashville since 2018 and, initially, would get together with a handful of other tight ends to train. Following the 2020 season, he sought tips from retiring Pro Bowler Greg Olsen, who suggested they loop in Kelce. From there, “Tight End University” was born with dozens of them convening at a local high school. Since 2022, close to 100, including Rob Gronkowski and many active players, have descended on Vanderbilt University to trade trips and techniques while mentoring younger players.
“It’s something that’s become more and more special to me as the years have gone on,” said Kelce. “And I’m excited again to get around the guys. The tight end room is a very unique room, it’s a lot of unselfish guys that come together that are just willing to do whatever the team needs them to do.
“So when you get everybody in the same building – typically we all have a lot of high energy and a lot of fun doing what we do – so the atmosphere is almost like you’re at an All-Star Game, or at a Pro Bowl, or at a Super Bowl, because everybody’s excited to be around each other. And then, on top of that, just trying to spread the knowledge and help anybody excel their game and take the nuggets of gold when you can.”
Kittle is also most associated with the promotion of “National Tight Ends Day” every October, even though the term came from an off-hand remark by former Niners quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo. Still, the faux holiday speaks to Kittle’s pride and investment in his job.
“If you look at the last six Super Bowls, there’s been an elite tight end that’s been playing,” said Kittle, while also noting the breakout seasons of younger players like the Detroit Lions’ Sam LaPorta and Dallas Cowboys’ Jake Ferguson.
“I think it just goes to show that when you have a really good tight end – a dominant tight end – who can affect the game in multiple ways, you have a higher chance of winning football games later in the season.”
Stars on the field
Since the start of the 2018 season, either Kelce or Kittle has been the NFL’s All-Pro tight end every season save 2021 (when it was the Baltimore Ravens’ Mark Andrews). They’ve combined for 14 Pro Bowl nods and are widely acclaimed as the best in the business – even if they approach their duties differently.
“They’re the two best tight ends in the league,” 49ers All-Pro fullback Kyle Juszczyk, a tight end at Harvard, told USA TODAY Sports. “George brings a physicality everywhere in his game – not just in his blocking, it’s in his route-running, it’s in his yards after contact. And I think that’s his superpower. And he’s incredibly fast for someone his size (6-4, 250 pounds) – he gets in the open field, nobody’s catching him. And I think that’s really what sets him apart. You just get the ball in his hands, and he’s gonna do good stuff – and you can’t always say that for tight ends. Same thing with Travis.
“Travis and George are both guys, you just want to get the ball in their hands, and then they’ll go make something happen.”
Three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year J.J. Watt, now a CBS analyst who used to moonlight as a tight end for the Houston Texans, offered a similar analysis.
“They’re very different in their games, but they are very, very good at what they do,” Watt told USA TODAY Sports. “Travis, he can find ways to get open and, as a defensive lineman, sometimes I’d turn around after the ball was thrown and I’m like, ‘Guys, it’s Travis Kelce, how is he that open?’ But he finds ways – he sits in these zones, he gets into these patterns, and he has such a great chemistry with (Chiefs quarterback Patrick) Mahomes.
“And then Kittle does very similar things in the pass game – he can get open, he can find ways to catch any ball. But he also is dominant in the run game. He can block, he can stick his nose in there. They’re two of the best in the league.”
After a scalding 2023 postseason, Kelce’s 156 career playoff receptions now stand as an NFL record, breaking Hall of Famer Jerry Rice’s former standard (151). Only Rice has more postseason receiving yards than Kelce’s 1,810 or touchdown grabs than Kelce’s 19. He finished the regular season with 984 receiving yards, breaking a string of seven consecutive 1,000-yard campaigns – Olsen the only other tight end to do that even three years in a row.
“Travis’ numbers probably stand up for themselves. I would tell you that he has an opportunity to go down as one of the best – if not the best – tight ends to play,” said Chiefs coach Andy Reid.
“Has he spent a ton of time worrying about that? I don’t think he does. Every game he goes, ‘Let’s just go win.’ That’s just kind of his thinking.”
Said Kittle, who takes fierce pride in his own blocking prowess: “I think we both have a pretty similar mentality about we have a standard for ourselves – we want to play at a very high level. I mean, we both love the game of football, we both love our teammates, we both like to make big plays, we both like touchdowns, stuff like that. Differences? I think we both play tight end, but we just both play it in a very different way. But it works for both of us because of the way our offenses are.”
Stars off the field
Kelce’s come quite far from being a third-round pick out of the University of Cincinnati, where he got kicked off the team for a season, and barely playing as a rookie in 2013. However he became a starter for the Chiefs in 2014 and almost immediately emerged as an elite performer. He leveled up his profile at Super Bowl 57, the first to feature brothers playing for opposing teams, as he and Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce and their mother, Donna, became ubiquitous media presences. The NFL siblings also gained popularity via their “New Heights” podcast.
Then Travis began dating pop megastar Taylor Swift in 2023, and his visibility went stratospheric. After nearly a full season of documenting their romance and travels, media outlets have dispatched reporters to Super Bowl 58 solely to cover Kelce and his relationship with Swift, who’s expected to fly to Vegas following her concert performance in Tokyo on Saturday night.
Asked Thursday why people are so enamored of his and Swift’s personal life, Kelce said: “I think the values that we stand for and just who we are as people. We love to shine light on others, shine light around the people that help and support us. And, on top of that, I feel like we both have just a love for life.”
Kittle chuckled about it, admitting he wouldn’t want that much attention but looks forward to grabbing a beer with Kelce to catch up on his jet-fueled stardom.
“While it might seem to all of us it could be a distraction, it might not be to him. I think Travis is a mature man, he knows how to handle his business. And I think he puts football over everything,” said Kittle. “He obviously knows how to handle anything going on off the field.”
And, apparently, that might soon include movie roles for Kelce, who appeared on “Saturday Night Live” last year.
“I’m comedy all the way, I don’t know if I’m anything else,” he said. “I just like to have a fun time and make people laugh. I’ll dabble into everything, though, just to see if I have fun doing it.
“There’s definitely Hollywood talks out there, but I’ve been focused on football throughout the season. So I’ll probably have a lot of those meetings and conversations when it’s all said and done.”
And don’t be surprised if Kittle – almost unfailingly effervescent, polite and often hilarious – somehow gets intertwined with some of those prospective ventures.
‘I always mess with George,’ said 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan. ‘You go back and watch him his first year, he didn’t have wristbands on or his socks real weird, had a clean-cut haircut. Then the second year, he was the WWE champ.’
A professional wrestling afficionado, Kittle, who’s hard to miss with his self-described Viking hairdo, has already dabbled in that space. He also immerses himself in pop culture, be it his love of movies, Air Jordans or any number of famous characters he inks onto his body.
“I’m big into alter egos,” said Kittle. “I think I channel energy through different characters and so, like, those character that I want to draw energy from, I tattoo on myself – that’s how I viewed it. And so Iike I have a bad guy arm, I have a good guy arm.
“I’ve got the Joker, I have Venom from ‘Spider-Man,’ I have Godzilla, I have the Master Chief from ‘Halo,’ Hobbes from ‘Calvin and Hobbes.’ And so what I try to do is draw energy from these things while I’m playing football or just like in my everyday life. Because they’re all like kinda superheroes to me, and so if you can draw some of a superhero’s qualities, then you might able to do something cool with your life.”
Kelce and Kittle are both doing numerous cool things with their lives at the moment – though the focus for the former is being rubber-stamped as a dynasty, Kelce acknowledging three Super Bowl victories being a next-level accomplishment. Meanwhile, Kittle seeks his first ring four years after losing to the Chiefs in Super Bowl 54. But whatever happens Sunday evening isn’t going to detract from the bond that’s already formed between the men.
“It’s been really fun to be friends with him,” Kittle said of Kelce. “Just because he’s such a genuine person, and he treats me and my family like they’re his own family, too, which – it’s very awesome.”
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Follow USA TODAY Sports’ Nate Davis on X, formerly Twitter @ByNateDavis.