Travis Kelce is a lot of things: a future Hall of Fame tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, a holder of 12 NFL records, a ‘New Neights’ podcast co-host and, of course, Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.
In a recent GQ profile of Kelce, his brother, Jason Kelce, added one more identifier to the list.
‘There will be arguments about him versus Gronk, versus Tony Gonzalez, but I don’t think anybody has ever been as unique of a player in that spot,’ Jason said.
To Jason’s point, Travis is truly 1-of-1 in several statistical categories. In the Chiefs’ two most recent playoff runs, the tight end broke three of legendary wide receiver Jerry Rice’s NFL postseason records. He now stands alone as the NFL record-holder for career postseason receptions (172), career postseason 100-yard games (9) and career Super Bowl receptions (35).
Jason and former Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith talked more about Travis’ intelligence and uniqueness as a person and player throughout the article.
The elder Kelce brother spoke about a ‘Travis Moment’ from their childhood, when he put together a full Erector set without reading the instructions while Jason and their father, Ed, were still reading them.
Smith brought up examples of Travis’ ball knowledge from early in the tight end’s career, mentioning how he would add his own improvisational tweaks to routes to get open.
‘Every single pass play, wherever I was going, whatever the concept intended for me to throw, whatever defensive look I was getting, it didn’t matter: Travis was open,’ Smith told GQ. ‘He was supposed to turn out, but on this one he flipped in, and he was open. He always put his little twist on it, and it worked.’
Smith pointed to one specific example of Kelce changing a route from a fake shallow cross with a cut back to a real shallow cross with a hesitation step before carrying on when he saw his defender didn’t buy the fake.
‘This is an NFL game!’ Smith said. ‘We had never talked about this! This was not remotely a possibility for him when we installed this play! It turned into a 35-yard gain. This is the brilliance of Kelce.’