Kelly Stafford doesn’t have the luxury of staying in the pocket.
The wife of Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford knew that starting her podcast The Morning After and becoming a more public figure would result in a super-charged level of scrutiny—of her and her family—but such is the life of a modern WAG these days.
A term, incidentally, that Kelly is all for redefining.
“I’m pretty old now in this game. Sometimes it’s tough to figure out the similarities with the young one or the young wives coming in or girlfriends,” the 36-year-old said on an August episode of Sydney Leroux and Ali Riley‘s BFFR podcast. “But obviously, it’s best if we do get together because that’s the community.”
And “being the quarterback’s wife,” Kelly noted, “there is a responsibility there.”
Yet while the mother of four daughters with Matt—twins Sawyer and Chandler, 8, plus Hunter, 7, and Tyler, 5—always expected to manage the home team during football season, she’s also often the family’s first line of defense when it comes to protecting them from unnecessary roughness online.
Usually Kelly likes to run a candid route when it comes to tackling stories about her family—such as when her daughters were teased at school because the latest batch of trade rumors about their dad highlighted their mom as the deciding factor in whether to ship Matthew to another team. (Spoiler alert: He was not traded and will be starting for the Rams when they kick off their season Sept. 7.)
“I was like, ‘Because of me?’” Kelly recalled being flabbergasted on an August episode of Sunday Sports Club. “I was, like, ‘What the f–k?!'”
Though sometimes she can have a little fun with the rumor mill because, otherwise, what was Kelly supposed to do about the super-well-thought-out conspiracy theory that Matthew was dead and had been replaced by a clone?
“I knew there was something different about him,” Kelly captioned a screenshot of a Barstool Sports headline paying respect to the rumor.
Read on for more of the plays Kelly and Matt have invoked to sack rumors before they start racking up yardage in their minds:
When the Matthew Stafford Trade Rumors Look Legit
In November 2024, Kelly Stafford admitted she started “spiraling” after seeing on Instagram that her husband Matthew Stafford was being traded from the Los Angeles Rams to the Minnesota Vikings.
Her first instinct was to text Matt right away, “like, ‘What’s happening?'” she shared on an episode of her podcast The Morning After With Kelly & Hank. “And that’s one thing you don’t want to text your husband. ‘Hey, have you heard you’re getting traded?’”
She ultimately deemed such a message “inappropriate” unless he brought it up, figuring the athlete would have seen the rumors himself.
Having already packed up their life to move to L.A. in 2021 after spending the first 12 seasons of Matt’s career in Detroit, their daughters would be “devastated” if they had to relocate, Kelly said. But, she added, “I’ve always told myself I will never separate our family, because it’s not fair to anyone. It’s not fair to him to not be able to see his girls; it’s not fair to the girls to not see their Dad. I would lose my mind without him.”
Dealing With Retirement Speculation
While Kelly reiterated on a Morning After episode in February 2025 that trade rumors could be really distressing, constant speculation about whether her husband was retiring or not was also quite annoying. And she insinuated that the Rams could do a better job shutting all that down.
“There has to be a slight feeling of being valued or respected,” she explained. “I feel like I have to be the dog in this situation. I want the respect for him that he deserves…I was just going to slide past it, but it has been upsetting me.”
Matt, generally not one to complain, confessed on a March 2025 episode of New Heights that “there were some trade rumors that [were] a little bit tough on the family, because you don’t know what’s going to be next.”
On Whether Matthew Stafford Was Having Trouble Connecting With His Teammates
Kelly acknowledged she may have taken the ball and run with it when she noted on her podcast in August 2023 that a lot of Matthew’s teammates were of a different generation, one that’s much more attached to their phones and social media.
Cue the headlines about her saying that Matt wasn’t connecting with his fellow Rams.
“I think those guys understand where I’m coming from,” Matthew said about a week later, per ESPN, making a rare comment about a rumor. “They see me come in this building every single day and know how I go to work, know how I interact with everybody and we didn’t really think too much about it to be honest with you.”
Recalling the controversy on the Him & Her podcast in January 2025, Kelly said, “They manipulated it, which they always do. But everyone just reads headlines.”
When the Kids Hear That Mom Is Difficult
Kelly isn’t the first wife or girlfriend of an athlete to find herself the subject of chatter that, hi, she’s the problem, it’s her.
But she was pretty perturbed when the latest off-season trade rumor about their dad—this time costarring their mother—made it all the way to her daughters.
“The kids at school were picking on them, like, ‘You’re gonna have to move because your mom is an issue,’ like, ‘she’s too loud’ and whatever,” Kelly shared on an August 2025 episode of Sunday Sports Club. “My girls came home and they’re like, ‘Mommy, are we having to move because of you?’ I was like, ‘Because of me?’ I was, like, ‘What the f–k?’ It wasn’t the Rams!”
Sacking a Rumor Kelly Had Cancer
Following surgery to remove a brain tumor in 2019, Kelly takes health matters seriously. So she did not appreciate speculation that she had cancer after she talked about having stomach pain.
“There is a bunch circulating right now and want to reiterate that I DO NOT HAVE CANCER,” Kelly wrote on Instagram in July 2023. “If journalists actually took time to check facts these days, they would know this. I’m infuriated. Most the time I wouldn’t care what people wrote because it didn’t matter.”
But, she explained, “This matters because it takes away from the people who are fighting this horrible disease, fighting to live another day, fighting to be there with the ones they love, fighting 24/7.”
Her Daughters’ Health Scare
Guessing that inquiring minds would want to know, Kelly shared in January 2025 that the twins required a trip to an Arizona hospital while they were in town for a playoff game—and later clarified the real reason for the visit.
“The flu is the flu, but it had turned into more than that,” Kelly told E! News a few weeks later once her girls were on the mend. “There were other infections occurring that I was unaware of.” She acknowledged coming down with “mom guilt” in the meantime.
So, she advised, “If your kid has the flu, just make sure you stay on top of it.”
When Your Husband Might Be a Clone
Kelly at least knew her husband was alive and only absent from Rams practice because he was recovering from a back injury. So, she was happy to have fun with that tall tale in August 2025.
“I knew there was something different about him,” she wrote on her Instagram Story, sharing the comprehensive Barstool Sports headline, “The Best NFL Conspiracy Theory On The Internet – Matthew Stafford Died A Couple Weeks Ago, Got Cloned, New One Is Now QB1 for the Rams.”
On Reining It In for Her Kids
“I’m very real and vulnerable on my podcast,” Kelly said on Him & Her, “and I’m OK with that, but I do feel like sometimes it gets to the point where maybe my daughters, when they grow up, they’re like, ‘I don’t want this following me.’ So I’ve stopped using names. But stories, it’s hard, because being a parent is talking about maybe the best and worst parts of your day with your child. And that’s a lot about what my podcast is, so it’s hard to take them completely out of it.”
