Travis Kelce Showed Clear Sign That ‘Retirement Is Imminent’ After NFL Season Ended
There comes a point in every great athlete‘s career when speculation begins about when they will retire. For Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, that time has come.
After a disappointing season in which the Chiefs did not make the playoffs for the first time since 2014, the chatter about whether Kelce is going to retire has been in full swing.
Kelce has nothing left to prove. He’s won three Super Bowls and put up numbers that cement him as one of the best tight ends ever. Given that he’s accomplished so much on the field, will he hang it up and ride off into the sunset with his fianceé, Taylor Swift? An expert says Kelce showed he’s ready to do just that.
Reporters quizzed Kelce about his future after the Chiefs fell to the Las Vegas Raiders in KC’s final regular-season game. He considered retirement last year and took some time away before deciding to return for another season. So many were curious to know if he planned to do that again. While he wouldn’t specifically say if this is the end of the road for his NFL career, one expert saw something in his actions that points to yes.
Darren Stanton is a body language and behavioral expert with a degree in psychology. He previously worked as a police officer and used his expertise to uncover the truth when interviewing hundreds of suspects. Stanton later moved into media and TV as a consultant and earned the title “Human Lie Detector.”
Speaking on behalf of OLBG, Stanton told Showbiz Cheat Sheet that when Kelce spoke, he saw “some really interesting shots of lip compression. What that means is when people do that immediately after making a statement or declaration, it means they have absolutely no confidence in what they’ve just said, or they’ve said too much. So it’s an unconscious gesture that people kind of make when they feel they’ve basically spilled the beans or said something they didn’t want to say, or they’ve gone down a road they didn’t want to go down. So I think his retirement is imminent.”
“[Kelce] is trying to leave it up in the air and leave it open-ended and make it sound vague like he has not made a decision,” Stanton continued. “But my belief is that he has made a decision. I think he is probably going to announce his retirement, because when people make a statement about things, there’s a fluency to it. There’s a congruency with body language and what we call statement analysis. So it’s the non-verbal vs the verbal.”
The expert added, “With Kelce, his non-verbal gestures are not congruent with what he is saying. So basically, that lip compression or lip press is a really classic textbook red flag for basically unconsciously displaying the fact that he has said too much. He didn’t want to announce what he said. So it’s almost a way of shutting himself up.”
Showbiz Cheat Sheet acknowledges that conditions and cultures can impact body language and is sensitive to all backgrounds.
