NBC had one job before Sunday Night Football kicked off: introduce a Chiefs-Colts game to a national audience. Instead it introduced Nikki Glaser. The cold open for Sunday’s broadcast starred the comedian and self-described Chiefs superfan in a Taylor Swift-scored bit, wearing a custom sequined No. 87 jersey with “TAYLOR’S HUSBAND” stitched where Travis Kelce’s name should go, and at no point did it show an Indianapolis Colt, say the word “Indianapolis,” or otherwise let on that a second team was scheduled to play. NBC didn’t just pick a favorite for one broadcast; it built its entire prime-time cold open as if the other sideline were empty.
Glaser’s bit was funny, credit where it’s due, and she knows exactly what she’s doing when she says, “When you’re on top of your game, everybody roots for your downfall… People love a winner — until they win too much.” That line works as comedy because it assumes the premise it’s mocking: that the Chiefs are the only team worth rooting for or against in this game, that the Colts exist purely as scenery for someone else’s dynasty bit. NBC picked its winner before kickoff, and then the actual football happened to disagree with the script.
What the cold open didn’t have room for: Indianapolis led 20-17 at halftime. The Colts tied it 27-27 in the fourth quarter against a two-time-defending-contender roster that’s supposed to be out of everyone else’s weight class, and the game only ended the way NBC’s promo assumed it would when Harrison Butker made a field goal in overtime, per ESPN’s box score. Final: Chiefs 33, Colts 30. Patrick Mahomes threw three touchdowns, to Kelce, Xavier Worthy, and Jalen Royals, and needed every one of them plus overtime to beat a team his own network had decided wasn’t worth naming. The Colts led at halftime and NBC never noticed; call it what it actually was, an editorial position delivered before the teams had even finished warming up.
A cold open is a lot like an opening statement in a trial that skips straight to closing arguments; it tells the jury what to believe before either side presents a single fact, and it works precisely because nobody’s supposed to notice they never got to hear from the defense. NBC’s version cast the Chiefs as the plaintiff, the defendant, and the entire jury, then filled the courtroom with sequins and a pop song so nobody would ask where opposing counsel went. Indianapolis showed up to argue its case for four quarters and overtime and came within a made field goal of winning it outright. The broadcast had already ruled.
That’s the detail that turns a rushed edit into something closer to a verdict already on the books. If the Colts had gotten run out of the building, you could wave off the whole open as lazy shorthand, the kind of skipped formality you get when everyone already knows the outcome. They didn’t get run out of the building. They forced overtime against Kansas City and made their case in full; NBC just never entered it into the record.
Fans noticed the gap between the broadcast’s version of the game and the one that actually happened. “This is a national broadcast, you can’t just act like the other team doesn’t exist,” read one reaction to the promo, cited alongside similar complaints by Fan Recap, which called the segment “a big middle finger to actual fans of the damn sport.” What made the backlash interesting wasn’t that Colts fans were furious; that part’s automatic. It’s that Chiefs fans were furious too. “That Nikki Glaser thing was NAUSEATING,” one wrote, in comments Yahoo Sports compiled. “Broadcasts should be neutral, and this is anything but neutral.” Another just asked who signed off on it and why. No one at NBC has answered either question publicly.
NBC’s own broadcast account posted the segment:
https://twitter.com/SNFonNBC/status/2101829528033104201
Watch it again knowing the score ended up 33-30 in overtime and the joke gets worse, not better; the network wrote a coronation for a team that had to sweat out a field goal to avoid an upset, and it never occurred to anyone in the edit bay that the other half of the broadcast might be worth a single frame.
The “Taylor’s Husband” jersey isn’t even the real problem. Swift and Kelce were actually married on July 3 at Madison Square Garden, so the joke is accurate rather than presumptuous, and Glaser sells it well. The real problem is a broadcast that treated a 0-2 team’s desperate, nearly-successful attempt to win a football game as an inconvenience to somebody else’s bit, and never blinked while doing it. NBC dropped the pretense of neutrality on purpose, and never once bothered picking it back up.
