Look what you made us do: Debunking the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce Super Bowl conspiracies

We here at the Star Tribune take investigative journalism seriously, so when we heard that Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce was a combination publicity stunt and political psy-op, we went to work.

We filled conference rooms with documents. We executed data analysis. We shined flashlights into the dark web. We wore tinfoil hats over our virtual-reality goggles.

What we found will shock you.

Swift is desperately seeking publicity. She was hired by the NFL to increase the league’s popularity. The NFL is rigging games to benefit the Chiefs. Swift is, indeed, a political psy-op agent, and Kelce is her partner in crime.

Here’s the proof:

• Kelce and Swift were facing financial ruin before they orchestrated their sham relationship. Kelce has made only $77 million as a football player, and another handful of millions in endorsements. He’s going to make only $28 million more in the two final years of his contract, and then may have to take a pay cut that could limit him to single-digit millions per year. Plus endorsements.

Dating Swift is the only way Kelce could afford to buy a house in Kansas City, where all those rich elites have driven up property values.

Swift’s influence is so overwhelming that many advertisers hired Kelce before he even met her.

Bloomberg News has estimated Swift’s wealth at $1.1 billion. Together, Kelce and Swift, if they time the market right, may be able to afford one of those homes real estate agents describe as “needing a little love.”

• The NFL was dying before Swift began hogging the spotlight. She orchestrated her spotlight-hogging by sitting in a private suite and allowing network cameras to show her face for up to 25 seconds throughout a three-hour game while doing zero interviews with NFL media.

Last September, the NFL was estimated to be worth $163 billion. The Dallas Cowboys alone are thought to be worth $10 billion.

Clearly, the NFL needed a Swift kick to the bottom line.

Which is why the NFL ...

• Rigged Chiefs games. Heck, the NFL has done nothing but pave the way for the Chiefs to dominate the league because, as we all know, major sports leagues consider Kansas City to be their most important market. That’s why the NFL bribed nine teams, including the small-market Bears and Jets, to pass on Mahomes in the 2017 NFL draft. That’s why the NFL allowed the massive-market Tampa Bay Buccaneers to beat the Chiefs in Super Bowl LV and the even-bigger-market Cincinnati Bengals to defeat the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game two years ago.

Even more deviously, the NFL orchestrated last year’s Super Bowl, ensuring that the major-market Chiefs would defeat the Eagles, who hail from a little suburb of Camden, N.J., named Philadelphia.

• This is not a result of our exhaustive financial investigation, just a human observation: These two are desperate. How could either ever get a date if they weren’t using each other?

• The most serious charge against Swift is that she is a political psy-op agent. Well, as we say in the investigative reporting business, obvi.

Swift is an American citizen encouraging other Americans to vote, and there is no place in a democracy for voting.

• If you need more proof, well, guess what anagrams you can derive from their names.

“Fake story.” “Fake love.” “Is it real?”

Their names also offer betting advice: “Take (the) over.”

Case closed.

What should frighten you is that there is more to come. Swift alone will determine who wins the Super Bowl, the next presidential election and the next Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.

This is a travesty, which sounds suspiciously like “Travis ---ce.”

Our sources tell us that after the NFL orchestrates another Chiefs Super Bowl victory on Sunday, Swift and Kelce will not go to Disneyland.

They will fly in a black helicopter to Area 51, where they will party with Elvis and JFK, examine airplane contrails with Aaron Rodgers, then fake a moon landing.

We stand by our reporting.