A few photos and videos of tight end Travis Kelce went viral during Chiefs training camp in St. Joseph — for good and bad reasons. It was such a big deal that Kelce and his brother, Jason, talked about it on the latest episode of the New Heights podcast this week.
One positive video showed Kelce put a sick move on safety Alohi Gilman and caught a pass, prompting a lot of talk about how the veteran tight end still looked good as he was entering his 14th season.
“I liked watching this because you’re my brother, and I thought it was great,” said Jason Kelce, the ESPN analyst and former Eagles center. “(But) I cannot stand when teams put these clips online. The Eagles do it, too, and I love the Philadelphia Eagles, and I love watching the clips. But like they put out a clip of like Jalen Carter beating the (heck) out of a guy who’s tried his hardest to make the team. It’s like, ‘Dude, can we just let practice be its own thing? We don’t need to show everything.’
“It’s open practice, so there’s no point in even holding it back. That’s just one thing. Like, to me, if there’s one safe space that a guy should feel good about, like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna try this new thing, and it might not work out but I’m gonna try it in practice because it’s not a game.’ And then all of a sudden, it’s basically the old (ESPN news alert) but worse, because now it lives forever on social media.”
Even the fake stuff doesn’t go away.
In the case of Travis Kelce, there was a weekend’s worth of posts being shared about how much weight he had gained. A video that was clearly generated by AI showed Kelce with a big belly as he walked around at training camp.
“It wasn’t all good,” Jason Kelce. “It did start off with a lot of, I mean, the only way I could describe it is fat-shaming my brother.”
That was exactly the case. One X account with more than 400,000 followers said Kelce looked out of shape.
“We were in a world there for a little bit where they were saying fat is bad. Fat is bad,” Travis Kelce quipped. “Just saying, man, sometimes fat could be good, too.”
Jason Kelce said: “What’s crazy is AI has gotten so good it was hard to tell cycling through those photos, like, what is the real photo?”
Travis joked: “How fat is Travis? Can he be that fat?”
Although it was fat-shaming, the brothers laughed about it because that video was ludicrous, but there are casual fans who might not have known better.
Travis Kelce then said the videos — positive and negative — need to be taken with a grain of salt.
“He’s been wearing baggy shirts lately, so maybe that’s it,” Kelce said kiddingly. “Even the route right there, where I beat Gilman, who’s a great player, and he got me a lot of the times in camp, too. You don’t see everything that’s out there. They just saw how slow that route was, and what they don’t realize is that that route is based off of a hundred other routes that I ran that that camp, and I’m setting up that move, or I’m trying to entice that move, and I’m going so slow. It’s like I’m feeding you what you want, to try and jump the route that you think I’m going to run.
“That (stuff) was so … funny. Reading some of these comments on that clip going viral, and then obviously the fat-shaming and saying that I got a dad body. It’s all social media’s just having fun, and I even laugh at this (stuff). I mean, it’s … pure comedy.”
Jason Kelce noted that shortly after those fake videos were going viral on social media, coach Andy Reid came to Travis Kelce’s defense at camp.
That was news to Travis Kelce, and he was happy to hear it.
“There have been other years when I’ve come in way fatter than I am this year, for sure,” Travis Kelce said. “We’re doing good so far.”
Pete Grathoff; The Kansas City Star; (TNS) || ©2026 The Kansas City Star. Visit kansascity.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
