Travis Kelce Finally Unlocks Browns Trauma As Chiefs TE Reveals Tearful Confrontation

Merely 10 miles from the Lake Erie-adjacent Cleveland Municipal Stadium, two little boys grew up with a dream. Every time their favorite team would play, they’d sit wide-eyed in front of the television set, unable to move. Every conversation and “What do you want to be when you grow up?” essay would witness the same thing: Jason and his little brother Travis Kelce’s passion for the Cleveland Browns. Their fanaticism, now the stuff of legends, even reached a fever pitch one particular Halloween when the duo dressed up as team icon Bernie Kosar. However, that’s all that remains now—memories, and perhaps a framed photograph from that year in the old family home.

Because, despite the Kelce brothers beating their chests as a proud Dawg Pound member all their lives, they hardly received the same love back. During the 2011 NFL Draft, Jason Kelce was painfully brushed aside to ultimately land with the Philadelphia Eagles (191st overall). Travis, too, faced the same predicament just two years later: The Browns picked Barkevious Mingo (6th), Leon McFadden (68th), Jamoris Slaughter (175th), Armonty Bryant (217th), and Garrett Gilkey (227th), with the tight end’s name nowhere to be found in the front office’s plans. And that supposedly didn’t go down too well with the Kansas City Chiefs player that year.

In a conversation with GQ released August 11, Travis Kelce recalled the paranoia his 23-year-old self felt while preparing for the NFL Draft. “I cried in [head coach Rob Chudzinski’s] office and said, ‘I will f—ing die for this city!’” he admitted to Sean Manning before adding, “I literally was in tears. I said, ‘I’m sorry I’m getting emotional. I grew up down the street. I would f—ing do anything to play for the Cleveland Browns.’ He looked at me like I was insane. I don’t think he’d ever had somebody just pour out their emotions.” And for those of you who think Kelce is exaggerating, his mother Donna also kind of attested to the same a few years ago…

During a chat with 3WKYC’s Jay Crawford in 2022, when asked about her sons ever going back to the Browns, the mother said, “The Browns have to want them first. Travis was out there, and they didn’t pick him, and he was crushed. He always wanted to play there. But it just didn’t happen. It is what it is.” Well, in hindsight, that ignorance has paid off with two Hall of Fame-worthy runs for the brothers.

A career spanning over a decade, Travis Kelce has put up excellent numbers for the Chiefs. We’re talking about three Super Bowl rings, ten Pro Bowl honors, over 1,000 receptions for over 12,000 yards. A year or two from now, when Kelce hangs up his cleats, he’ll presumably be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns’ front office will probably keep wondering about the ones that got away.