This weekend, Donna and Ed Kelce have a dilemma.
Both of their sons — Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and Eagles center Jason Kelce — play in their respective conference championships Sunday. But unlike last year, when Donna bounced from Tampa to Kansas City the same day for wild-card round matchups, there’s not enough time in between the pair of games.
So the Kelce parents will be watching from Lincoln Financial Field, they told P.J. Ziegler of FOX 8 in Cleveland, Ohio. They attended Travis’ game in Kansas City last weekend, and this round, they’ll see the other son in person. And if both teams win again, it could pose an interesting challenge for who to root for in Super Bowl LVII.
“It’s your hopes and dreams coming true, but it’s your worst fears,” Donna said. “Somebody is going to go home a loser, and neither one of them lose very well.”
The one positive of a potential Super Bowl matchup, Ed said, is that both brothers play on offense — “probably rules out any fistfights,” he joked. These scenarios are what both Travis and Jason have dreamed about since they were young, Donna added, and with both of their respective teams holding the conference’s No. 1 seed, that next step — featuring an overlap in the Super Bowl — could become a reality by Sunday night.
If the Eagles and Chiefs both win, it’d mark the fourth time that Travis and Jason, who both attended Cincinnati and are two years apart, faced each other. The other three games occurred in 2021, 2017 and 2013, with Kansas City emerging with a victory in all three. Travis was inactive for the 2013 game during his rookie season.
Last weekend, Donna started her playoff tour in Kansas City, where the Chiefs hosted the Jaguars in the AFC divisional round. It had “never happened before,” she said in the Fox 8 interview, so that made the matchup appealing. There wasn’t enough time to make it to Philadelphia in time for Jason’s NFC divisional round game against the Giants, though.
Donna managed to see both of her sons play on the same day in 2021. She started in Tampa, where Jason and the Eagles were crushed by the Buccaneers. Then, she hopped on a plane after leaving at halftime — one that was delayed, according to Ziegler — and made it to Kansas City with enough time to see Travis.
The championship games are at 3:00 and 6:30 p.m. this weekend, so Ziegler reported that Donna will find a bar near the Eagles’ stadium as soon as the NFC Championship ends. That’ll allow her to still watch Travis — who looks to build on a First-Team AP All-Pro season that featured 1,338 receiving yards and 12 touchdowns in the regular season — from afar.
