Travis Kelce's Retirement Resolution With Kansas Metropolis Chiefs Formally Printed
Travis Kelce's Unusual Heights podcast confirmed his choice on returning to his Kansas Metropolis Chiefs team amid speculation he was once retiring after 13 seasons.
Travis Kelce will repeatedly be the fellow on the Chiefs.
The Kansas Metropolis Chiefs tight kill will officially be returning to the team for his 14th season amid speculation he would be retiring. His Unusual Heights podcast—which he hosts with brother Jason Kelce—shared the news March 9, writing on Instagram, “HE’S BACK!!! TRAVIS KELCE IS BACK WITH THE CHIEFS FOR YEAR 14.”
The NFL additionally confirmed that Travis—who received engaged to Taylor Swift in August—will play for the 2026-2027 season, sharing a video with the caption, “He’s no longer accomplished yet.”
The announcement follows a no longer easy season for the Chiefs, who overlooked out on the playoffs. Quarterback Patrick Mahomes suffered and ACL injury and the team ended their season with a loss to the Raiders Jan. 4.
After the season wrapped, Travis—who spent his complete professional profession on the Chiefs—was once calm uncertain about his future.
“Who is conscious of? Both [a decision] hits me fast, or I gotta take some time,” he urged The Kansas Metropolis Superstar. “Final year was once a exiguous bit bit more uncomplicated. I possess I knew real away I wished to give this [year] a shot. I don’t know. We’ll look.”
Even supposing Travis and the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs suffered a crushing loss at the 2025 Large Bowl to the Philadelphia Eagles in Unusual Orleans, he's received three Large Bowl championships over his 13 years in the NFL.
At some point soon of his profession, Travis has was broadly regarded as undoubtedly one of the fundamental very finest tight ends in NFL history, surroundings data in his space correct thru the league and the Kansas Metropolis organization.
Outdated to retirement rumors, Travis shared perception into the bodily and emotional toll that football takes while having a detect back on his profession.
“The reality that we preserve going to those AFC Championships, to Large Bowls,” Travis explained to Jason on a February 2025 episode of the Unusual Heights podcast. “Which formulation I’m taking half in an extra three video games bigger than all people else to your complete league. And that’s loads of damage to your physique. And that’s loads of time spent in the building, specializing to your craft, specializing in the job at hand and each suppose that you just negate up for yourself. And that project may maybe even be grueling.”
Jason, who retired from the Philadelphia Eagles in 2024, equipped his have brotherly advice as Travis pondered subsequent steps.
“It’s excellent the plug and the lumber that you just guys have had,” the 38-year-stale illustrious. “I comprehend it’s been frustrating to see at this recreation, on legend of it was once this form of dominating recreation for the Eagles, however the reality is it’s undoubtedly one of the fundamental improbable runs that’s ever came about on this f–king recreation. And also you guys have your legacies cemented in that and no-one can take that away.”
Certainly, his brotherhood along with his Chiefs teammates stays tough—of which contains quarterback Patrick, who shared his give a enhance to for Travis as questions about his NFL future loomed. “I’ll let Travis make that choice on his have, man,” Patrick acknowledged to reporters following the 2025 Large Bowl. “He’s given a lot to this team and to the NFL and been this form of joy, no longer totally for me to work with however for folks to detect.”
“I know he calm has indulge in for the sport,” the 30-year-stale persevered. “And he'll accept to employ a while along with his family and make that choice on his have, however he is conscious of he'll attain back here with welcome fingers. We indulge in that guy no longer totally for the football participant, however the individual that he’s every single day.”
Beyond football, Travis has been exploring other ventures in the spotlight. He made is appearing debut in Ryan Murphy’s FX series Grotesquerie and made a cameo in the upcoming film Elated Gilmore 2 alongside Adam Sandler. Plus, he’s been cyber web hosting the sport demonstrate Are You Smarter Than a Superstar? that comprises other extinct NFL players, TV stars and comedians. And he’s embracing the full alternatives coming his formulation.
“It’s been a enjoyable, enjoyable existence,” he urged E! Files in October 2024. “I will’t complain a few single thing over here.”
Study on to be taught more enjoyable facts on Travis…
1. Travis Kelce may maybe perchance neatly be inextricably linked to Kansas Metropolis, Mo., for existence, however he grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
And the man represents, shouting out his fatherland as an replace of his alma mater, College of Cincinnati, throughout recreation publicizes that encompass participant introductions.
Which, because it is probably going you’ll perchance guess, has irked some fellow alums.
“It’s no longer on legend of I don’t indulge in the time I had at the College of Cincinnati, on legend of I attain, I take care of it dearly,” Travis acknowledged in 2019 when he and mountainous brother Jason Kelce were inducted into the Cleveland Heights High Faculty Hall of Status. “However there was once a time when I was once at Cincinnati that it wasn't easy for me. It was once no longer easy. I received my scholarship taken from me. I did loads of dead issues. I'm obvious loads of folks on this room know somebody from Heights that's accomplished loads of dead issues. To all my website online visitors, I was once that guy.”
And the Heights weren't factual special to him, he persevered, however “to every single particular person up here. How various this role is. It builds something in me. Each thing I attain is for this metropolis. It sounds cliche, however I promise you, every single thing I attain in the market — while you look me dancing in the kill zone, that’s Cleveland Heights, for you, real there.”
2. About that revoked scholarship…
After the Bearcats' undefeated 2009 season that included a Huge East title, Travis failed a marijuana take a look at sooner than the 2010 Sugar Bowl after partying too laborious on Unusual Year's Eve in Unusual Orleans.
No longer totally did he high-tail away out the bowl recreation, the NCAA suspended him for the 2010 season and he lost his scholarship. Discovering himself without room and board, he moved in with Jason (literally into his brother's room in the home he shared with some teammates) and took a job as a telemarketer that entailed him asking somebody who picked up if they had strategies about the Reasonable Care Act.
They did, and Travis also can no longer wait to come once more on the topic.
3. Travis played hockey, baseball and basketball earlier than entering into football, and he was once a quarterback in high college. In spite of the entire lot, he was once a two-giant identify QB recruit for Cincinnati, and totally ended up switching to tight kill as a condition of his reinstatement to the team after his suspension.
“We had an improbable quarterback at the time in Zach Collaros and we wished some back in the lumber recreation as neatly because the passing recreation,” Travis urged Arrowhead Pleasure after he was once drafted by the Chiefs in 2013, “so I talked to coach Butch Jones, who was once my coach at the time, and he acknowledged we desire a tight kill and my skill-negate, athleticism and my route all transferred over and it labored out ultimate for me.”
Or, as he build it to GQ in 2017 while rehashing his un-sparkling second, “All people my complete existence had been telling me I was once a tight kill anyway.”
4. The house at 127 W. Nixon St. where Travis bunked with Jason and some fellow Bearcats was once the scene of loads of beer-infused shenanigans.
The brothers “feeble to indulge in taking half in Nintendo 64 for hours, smashing the controls and chugging beers at the identical time,” college friend and teammate Tom DeTemple urged the Unusual York Times earlier than the 2024 Large Bowl. “They would factual attain up with these random full of life video games while taking half in, they most continuously were extremely simply at it.”
5. And suffice it to narrate, Travis is extremely proud of being a Bearcat.
“It's all about Cincinnati, exiguous one,” he urged reporters earlier than the 2023 Large Bowl, which the Chiefs received to by beating the Bengals in the AFC Championship Game. “I've repeatedly been extraordinarily prideful of coming from the College of Cincinnati. I in the kill received my diploma. I strive to back out as a lot as I will. I’m going back to the university when I will. I factual high-tail away out being around all those players that I played with, and the full folks I met along the vogue there which have repeatedly been in my nook all the device in which thru the united statesand downs of existence.”
And when he was once down in the eyes of the NCAA, he persevered, “The players, the coaches, the workers that was once at the university at the time—in actuality believed in me so as to flip issues around and save better for myself. That was once enormous for me at the time.”
6. Nearly a decade after leaving college to enter the draft, Travis earned his stage in interdisciplinary learn in 2022—however didn't in finding his diploma until April 2024 throughout a surprise graduation ceremony after he and Jason taped a dwell episode of Unusual Heights at Cincinnati's Fifth Third Enviornment.
The graduate was once already preserving a can of beer as he approached the dean for his congratulatory handshake, after which he promptly chugged it.
And Travis was once going to graduate in 2022 however he overlooked his flight.
7. Largely due to his off-the-topic topic, Travis ended up totally the fifth tight kill picked in the 2013 NFL Draft, going first in the third round to the Chiefs. After which coach Andy Reid, who'd previously coached Jason in Philadelphia, requested the elder Kelce sibling to vouch for Travis.
Andy and Travis have three Large Bowl rings to illustrate for Jason's endorsement.
8. His hype tune also can simply have changed since, however for years Travis listened to Randy Newman's “Burn On” earlier than every recreation.
“I'm an east facet of Cleveland kid so growing up, I don't know why, however this tune brings me back to excited by family and excited by where I’m in existence and the device in which a lot I indulge in it,” he acknowledged on the NBC Sports activities podcast PFT Dwell in 2017.
Let us present: It's in the opening credit of Indispensable League, the final Cleveland sports activities film.
9. Everybody, including Travis, is mispronouncing his closing identify.
While he and Jason have factual long previous with Kelce sounding indulge in “Kel-look,” it actually rhymes with “else.”
Travis' teammate Chris Jones fired off that bombshell on All over the NFL in January—”F–king crazy, real?”—and the brothers confirmed as a lot after they confronted their dad Ed Kelce about it on their Unusual Heights podcast.
“Why on this planet did you replace your identify out of nowhere and now we’re Kel-look?” Jason requested. “Why did we predict that our identify was once Kel-look for the first 24 years… 27 years of my existence, 25 of Trav's?”
Ed admitted he “received drained of correcting folks” however urged his son to “attain whatever you desire.”
10. The No. 87 Travis has outmoded all the device in which thru his time in the NFL is a tribute to Jason, who was once born in 1987.
“If there is a Kelce legacy, two brothers making it to the NFL, it started in 1987, on legend of this mountainous guy was once born in 1987,” Travis explained to NFL Motion pictures sooner than the 2023 Large Bowl that comprises his Chiefs squaring off against Jason's Philadelphia Eagles.
11. Travis' basis 87 and Working has been a longtime benefactor of Operation Step forward, a nonprofit studying heart in Kansas Metropolis that the athlete has labored with since his first talk over with in 2015 to be taught The Cat in the Hat to the children.
Yes, reader, he wore the hat.
Since then, Travis has invested in the program's Honest Lab and sold the extinct muffler store subsequent door so to boot they may be able to delay and accept their Ignition Lab, where the young students transformed stale autos that also can've ended up on the scrap heap into working electric autos.
12. Travis and Jason call their Unusual Heights listeners “92 percenters” in reference to Jason once commenting that a play identified as a quarterback sneak labored “92 percent of the time” when all you wish is one yard to catch a landing.
Followers were apparently somewhat overjoyed and most continuously christened themselves the “92 percenters,” in step with the podcast's web online page, which likened it to “their secret handshake, however in words.”
Who were the Kelce brothers to argue with that?
13. Travis has three deepest trainers—Alex Skacel, Andrew Spruill and Laurence Justin Ng—and, in step with The Athletic, one most continuously travels with him wherever he goes to be obvious he stays in football-catching form all year round.
Alex, who's additionally a bodily therapist, recalled Travis searching for to high-tail for a slack night lumber after taking in a slate fats of reveals throughout Paris Vogue Week on legend of he overlooked determining that day.
“It's tiring night, and we're doing sprints over the bridges over the river,” the teacher urged the Unusual York Times in April. “Without reference to where he’s, he finds time to accept accomplished whatever he wants to accept accomplished.”
14. Travis' deepest chef, Kumar Ferguson, has been a friend for the reason that fourth grade in Cleveland Heights.
He was once an amateur put collectively dinner working as a truck driver in 2016 when Travis known as him up and equipped him the replace.
“He's indulge in, 'Hi there man, I must take my weight reduction program severely, and take it to the next stage,'” Kumar urged Conceitedness Pretty in 2023. “I'm indulge in, s–t, let's attain it. Three or four days later, I was once in Kansas Metropolis.”
He's been guilty for the entire lot from stocking Travis' fridge to turning in neatly-balanced lunches to the Chiefs' coaching facility.
15. Travis' facial hair is underneath the microscope bigger than ever now, so he explained on Unusual Heights that he shaved his off-season beard and saved the 'stache in 2023 as an homage to the walrus see appreciated by Andy Reid and decided to repeat in 2024.
16. The $34.25 million two-year contract Travis signed in April 2024 made him the highest-paid tight kill in the NFL for the first time in his profession.
Which in the kill build an kill to years of chatter about what quantity of money he wasn't making.
“My managers and agents indulge in to suppose me how underpaid I’m,” Travis quipped to Conceitedness Pretty in 2023. “Any time I discuss attempting more cash, they're factual indulge in, 'Why don't you high-tail to the Chiefs and query them?'”
However by then, with many other sources of profits having spread out for him, he cared more about the vibes than the paycheck.
“I'm indulge in, the free market seems to be indulge in enjoyable until you high-tail somewhere and you don’t accept,” he explained. “I indulge in winning. I indulge in the suppose I'm in.”
Seeing other players' enormous paydays “hits you in the gut a exiguous bit bit,” he admitted. “It makes you possess you’re being taken abet of. I don't know if I in actuality pressed the gas if I would accept what I’m quote-unquote rate. However I know I admire coming to that building every single day.”
17. Travis has been into garments since growing up in Cleveland Heights, where his high college “was once indulge in a style demonstrate on each day basis,” he urged Conceitedness Pretty in 2023.
Therefore the mattress room he transformed correct into a closet, the simpler to accommodate his dressmaker threads and better than 300 pairs of sneakers—including a pair of dimension-13 Nike Air Mags that he spent a large share of his rookie year wage on no topic them being a dimension too exiguous.
“Earlier on in my profession, after they didn't have all these sneaker apps,” he explained to the Wall Dual carriageway Journal, “it was once whatever dimension I will even accept in the shoe that I wished.”
While he's very a lot a Nike guy (and no longer factual for the reason that designate sponsors him), Chuck Taylors additionally withhold a procedure in his heart on legend of they remind him of fictional baseball phenom Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez in The Sandlot.
18. Amongst his dozens of investments, Travis co-owns Ohio-brewed Garage Beer with Jason.
“I possess each person is conscious of I must have a couple beers now after which,” Travis acknowledged in a June commentary, “so being an proprietor of Garage Beer and carefully concerned with making the very finest gentle beer is thrilling, man! There may maybe be nothing better to bring folks collectively than an ice-cool beer, and for Jason and me that is what beer is all about—website online visitors, family and enjoyable.”
19. We're sensing a theme by formulation of Travis' guilty pleasure TV picks.
Support in the day, it was once Gossip Lady: “I mean, it's awesome,” he acknowledged on Unusual Heights. “It indulge in a Unusual York high college demonstrate with loads of drama and most continuously all people gossiping and speaking s–t on every other.”
His contemporary favourite demonstrate? Peacock's Emmy-winning backstab-a-ganza The Traitors.
20. In his 12th year in the NFL at 35, Travis has been more open of slack about the toll the sport takes on the physique.
However he's been stoically getting hammered since day one, when he overlooked his rookie year with a microfracture in his knee that required the first of the ten surgical procedures he's had in his profession.
21. Travis build it in the market, speaking on Unusual Heights about his thwarted strive to affords Taylor Swift a friendship bracelet along with his number on it when the Eras Tour touched down in Kansas Metropolis.
And after hearing thru the grapevine (folks in her camp who knew who Travis was once and that he wished to meet her), she contacted him.
“She urged me precisely what was once occurring,” he urged WSJ. Magazine, “and the device in which I received lucky sufficient to accept her to attain out to me.”
22. One among Travis' favourite desserts since forever is French toast topped with whipped cream and syrups.
However more no longer too long in the past he's was a fan of his female friend's home made Pop-Tarts and cinnamon rolls.
23. A minimal of undoubtedly one of Travis' ringtones is Chris Farley shrieking “For the indulge in of God!” in Tommy Boy.
“I urged Taylor that I in actuality have that world, I've received to introduce it to her,” he urged WSJ. The Magazine of sharing his affinity for the comedy stylings of Farley, Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell along with his female friend. “I let her know: Here’s my jam real here.”
24. After screaming “You've received to fight for your real to occasion!” after their AFC Championship accept over the Bengals in 2019, Travis impressed the Chiefs to delivery taking half in the Beastie Boys tune of the identical identify following every home recreation landing at Arrowhead Stadium.
“It's indulge in an energy multiplier. That's laborious to quantify factual how fundamental that is,” Chiefs overall supervisor Brett Veach urged ESPN in 2020. “He plays with that originate of personality, charisma, ardour, and he brings folks along with him. In our building, all people is website online visitors with Travis Kelce. He is an final energy giver. He elevates all people's mood, focal point, consideration and at the kill of the day, he's calm enjoyable.”
However the boisterous celebrant who introduced it into their lives admittedly didn't know the full words to the 1986 classic until he was once tasked with performing it with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Display in February 2023.
25. Speaking of his jams, in May well 2024 Travis cited his three favourite Taylor songs as “Clean Space,” “The Alchemy” and “So High Faculty.”
Requested about it just a few months later, however, his solution had changed to, “They're all my favourite—literally every single one.”
However he's on the yarn announcing in August 2025 that his No. 1 discover from The Lifestyles of a Display Lady is “Opalite.”
26. Comparisons to the Chiefs' legendary tight kill Tony Gonzalez, who retired in 2013 after 17 seasons in the league, started early for Travis.
In 2015, when the chatter about whether he would, actually, surpass Tony's achievements—and the device in which disappointing it’d be if he didn't—was once heating up, Travis acknowledged he paid the noise no mind.
“No one locations bigger expectations on me than myself,” he urged Advanced. “I must have the finest season statistically that a tight kill has ever had.”
In 2024, Travis surpassed Tony to was the Chiefs' all-time chief in receptions along with his 917th obtain.
“It's crazy how issues repeatedly attain fats circle,” Travis acknowledged on Unusual Heights. “Being at the discontinue of the leaderboard with the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs who were around for the reason that '60s, undoubtedly one of the fundamental starting organizations that made it the full vogue wherein may maybe perchance neatly be calm at their peak. And loads of that is as a result of the filthy rich history they have gotten and to a guy indulge in Tony Gonzalez, who has been a mentor to me. I f–king indulge in the fellow.”
27. Of Travis' many accomplishments, conserving his house in suppose on his have isn't undoubtedly one of them.
“He can't natty,” mom Donna Kelce urged Extra in September 2024. “He can't put collectively dinner.”
However presumably cyber web hosting a distinct somebody served as extra motivation to accept it collectively.
“He's getting a exiguous bit better,” Donna acknowledged. “I possess he's getting some back.”
Source credit : eonline.com
