Travis Kelce contemplated retirement this offseason, but in the end, he felt it was too soon to hang them up. The tight end has unfinished business with Andy Reid and the Kansas City Chiefs, which is why he’s coming back for the 2025 NFL season.
His head coach spoke for the first time since the announcement, and of course, he couldn’t look happier. During an appearance on The Bettor Angle podcast, Reid warned the rest of the NFL that Kelce is locked in and that the tight end will prove that he continues to be the best at his position.
“He said he was coming back, and he’s all in,” Reid said, as quoted by Sports Illustrated. “He’s all in, he’s a heck of a player. I mean listen, he’s getting older but you’re talking about the guy that’s going to go down as maybe the best of all time at that position. And okay well, if he’s a step slower or whatever people are saying, he’s still one of the best in the National Football League and in my eyes he’s the best.“
Kelce will turn 36 in October, but that doesn’t matter to Reid. Even if the tight end comes from a complicated season which ended with a painful Super Bowl loss, the Chiefs head coach believes that the player still has enough left in the tank to help Kansas City succeed.
“Whatever he does on the field, the greatness that he is there, he’s even that much better off the field,” Reid added. “He’s a great teammate and a great human being, one of those guys you’d say—he’s not going to do it—but one of those guys you’d say, ‘I’d love to have him on my staff when he’s done playing.”
Kelce aims to bounce back with Reid’s Chiefs
2024 wasn’t easy for Kelce. Last year, the tight end logged 97 catches for a career-low 823 yards and just three touchdowns during the regular season. That made him question his future in the NFL.
And while he appeared to look like his true self at the start of the playoffs, Kelce was limited to just four receptions for 39 yards during the Chiefs’ blowout 40-22 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX.
His future looked up in the air after that game, but the lopsided result ended up convincing him to run things back for at least another year. Besides, Kelce thought that playing out the final season of his contract was the right thing to do.
“I don’t think it was my best outing. I think I let my guys down in a lot more moments than I helped them, especially if you look at my track record and how I’ve been in years past,” Kelce told his brother Jason on their New Heights podcast. “I want to give it a good run. I got a bad taste in my mouth on how I ended the year and how well I was playing and how accountable I was for the people around me.”
“I don’t want to leave that life yet. I put in a lot of hard work, and I put in a lot of focus into being the best that I can for KC, and last year it didn’t end well for us. I feel like there’s a responsibility in me to play out the contract that I initially signed, to give Kansas City and the Chiefs organization everything that I got. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
Kelce wants to do it for Reid
Reid is also a big reason Kelce wants to retire on a higher note. The tight end was drafted by the Chiefs in 2013, the same year Reid took over as head coach, and they went on to make five Super Bowls together, winning three of them.
“Coach Reid has been one of the biggest influences on my life, not just in the game of football,” Kelce said. “I don’t want to stop going to work with him. I don’t want to stop learning from him. I don’t want to stop being the reason why he has success or being part of the reason he has success. I want that guy to have the most success in the world because of who he’s been in my life. That’s the same with Pat (Mahomes). There are so many people in that building who I love with all my heart and I want to keep living out those dreams.”