Saquon Barkley doesn’t understand football fans’ bad blood toward Taylor Swift.
The Philadelphia Eagles star defended the singer after audience members booed her during the Super Bowl. “I remember they showed her on the jumbotron, and she got booed,” Barkley said during an appearance on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show. “I don’t get it. I don’t get why she was getting hate there. She was there supporting her significant other.”
Midway through the Super Bowl LIX broadcast on Sunday, live footage showed Swift on the jumbotron at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. Seated next to Ice Spice, Swift received a resoundingly negative reaction from the crowd — though she didn’t seem to realize what was happening, as she appeared to mouth, “Wait, what is going on?”
Swift’s appearances at various Kansas City Chiefs games supporting her boyfriend, tight end Travis Kelce, has garnered significant media attention. Stern speculated that the negative reaction at the Super Bowl came from Eagles fans: “She’s associated with the Chiefs, so it’s probably a bunch of Philly fans, but it’s a game, lighten up a little bit,” he said.
Barkley said that Swift’s presence at the games has helped widen the NFL’s audience. She made the game bigger,” he said. “In football, we’re all about, ‘How can we expand the game and make it more international?’ We’re traveling to Brazil, we’re traveling to Mexico, apparently we’re traveling to Australia soon. So we’re trying to expand the game, and her being a part of it’s only helping that. I don’t get the slack that she’s getting.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Barkley definitively crowned Bradley Cooper the biggest celebrity Eagles fan, narrowly edging out Kevin Hart. “I feel like he’s, I think, at every home game. I think I’ve seen him at every home game, I’m not gonna lie,” Barkley said of Cooper. “Kevin’s definitely a super fan, a big fan, too, so it’s hard to say. It’s probably 1A and 1B.”
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Barkley also named a surprising celebrity whom he was most star-struck to meet. “For me, it was Zac Efron,” he said. “I know that sounds crazy, but growing up with High School Musical, The Greatest Showman — my daughter loves that movie. And he’s a great dude. I was able to spend a lot of time with him.”
Stern noted that Efron has put on a ton of muscle over the last several years, and Barkley said that he discussed the actor’s transformation when he met him. “I brought that up and he was like, ‘I’m surprised you remember that!'” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘Zac. Zac Efron. What are we talking about here?’ but yeah, I used to train in L.A., and he was there training, and that’s the first time I met him.”
After Stern suggested that Barkley could find success as an action star, the running back made a sly reference to High School Musical: “This might be the start of something new.”