Patrick Mahomes Shares Bold New Observation About Taylor Swift’s Impact on the Kansas City Chiefs

L: Patrick Mahomes, R: Taylor Swift

The NFL may be on the proverbial public backburner as teams prepare to start training for the upcoming season, but Taylor Swift’s impact on the sport continues to make waves.

In a new interview with TIME celebrating him as one of the world’s 100 most influential people, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes broke down their most recent season, and now that he’s had some time to sit with the outcome of both their hard work and the influx of attention that Swift brought with her when she began dating tight end Travis Kelce, he’s also got a fresh perspective to share when it comes to the songstress.

Much as we like to joke that the touring artist put her beau and the rest of the Chiefs “on the map,” Kelce, Mahomes and the rest of the Chiefs were stars in their own league, fresh off of their then-most recent Super Bowl win when Swift first set foot in Arrowhead Stadium for a game.

Still, the Chief’s viewership expanded exponentially after the “Karma” songstress became a regular spectator—something the team’s CEO Clark Hunt and Mad Money host Jim Cramer called a “purely organic” and “unplanned phenomenon” that allowed the team’s “female audience [to grow by] leaps and bounds.”

Now, the quarterback is doubling down on the previous observations made, boldly declaring that the Chiefs “went from a nationwide team that was kind of global to a full global worldwide team.” That, he said, was thanks to “Taylor’s fanbase.”

While some suggested that Swift and the attention she brought with her was “distracting” the team, Mahomes said they all “embraced it,” assuring readers that the team “like[d] having that visibility.”

“At the end of the day, football has always been this bruising sport,” he continued. “We want to make it fun, where kids grow up and play football and show their personality and be who they are.” With a little unintentional help from Swift, he said, “This year really magnified that.”

But despite her record-breaking impact, Mahomes calls her “the most down-to-earth person that’s been on that stage for that long,” recalling how, when he was formally introduced to her at her first public game, she remembered crossing paths with him at the 2019 NFL Draft in Nashville.

His father agreed after meeting her, too, when he discovered that the superstar already knew who he was because she’d done her research by watching Netflix’s Quarterback docuseries.

It’s a quality that the quarterback really seems to admire, as he commended how her “business mind” has come into play when learning the game. “It’s almost like she’s trying to become a coach,” he observed. “‘Why can’t you try this, this, and this?’ She’s asking the right questions.”