I wasn’t checking the score during the Kansas City vs Baltimore game yesterday; Kathleen is my scoreboard, LOL. She can always be relied on to message me on weekends when TNT is in play. What I did see online, however, is that Usher was immediately trending after KC secured its place in the Super Bowl. 

 

Not every corner of the internet was thrilled about Kansas City advancing because, of course, it meant that Taylor Swift has advanced to the big show. And since the NFL is obsessed with her, some people are worried that Usher will be overshadowed. Here’s an example of why Usher was trending – and these are just the mild ones:  

 

The worry is that Taylor and all the cutaways will take away from Usher’s moment. And this wasn’t a subtle conversation – like I said, this was making noise online last night. Because it’s true, Usher SHOULD have all the attention. Usher’s been rehearsing for weeks. Usher is going to give us everything: bangers, vocals, choreo, big horny energy – all of it! 

 

But is Taylor actually going to be there? As we know, she’s in Japan to resume The Eras world tour next week. She plays her final show in Tokyo on Saturday 10 February. The Super Bowl is on Sunday 11 February. Which is why this video went viral, from an episode of The West Wing:

Short answer: yes, she can easily make it. Vegas is three hours behind Washington, DC, which is the time zone they were working off of in that clip so she has even more time to work with. If she wraps up in Tokyo by, say, 11pm Tokyo time, and gets on the jet by midnight, she can actually be in Vegas by 10pm Vegas time on Saturday night at the earliest. So she doesn’t even have to rush to get on her flight. She can take it easy and she’d still make it to Vegas with hours to spare. 

 

It's just… I mean it would ROUGH. Because in addition to all that flying to Vegas, she’d then have to turn around and get right back on a plane for Australia. By the time the Super Bowl is over on Sunday, it will be Monday night in Sydney. And it takes something like 18 hours to get to Sydney from Vegas. So she can’t stay in Vegas very long in order to make it to Australia for her show on Friday. Maybe a day, day and a half, tops? A motherf-cker of a schedule, if she decides to go. 

Who are we kidding? Of course she’s f-cking going, LOL. 

So, to bring it back to Usher, will Taylor via Tree Paine be making calls to the NFL and the broadcasters to politely request that they pump the breaks on all the cutaways, especially during Usher’s performance? It’s not her fault, obviously, that the cameras and the NFL are so fixated on her. She and her team aren’t the ones in the control room. But after all these weeks, she and her team are well aware of how much camera time she’s getting during the games. And they are also well aware, always, of online discourse. So it’ll be interesting to see whether or not that changes at the Super Bowl. Let’s take this over to The Squawk today. (app link here) We’ll talk about all of it: the rom-com, the travel, the camera time, your predictions, and more!