All of you Kansas City Chiefs haters out there, I can feel your pain.
If I hadn’t grown up in Kansas City and been dipped at birth in the team’s red and gold colors, I would be rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles in Sunday’s Super Bowl, too.
Nobody — other than a team’s own fan base — roots for a dynasty. We may like a team while it climbs up the mountain, but if it stays on top too long, it is human nature to want to see it fall back down.
I was that way 20 years ago with Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots.
I cheered for Brady, his coach and his team when the quarterback first burst onto the scene during the 2001 season, a second-year player who led the Patriots to the Super Bowl and a stunning upset over the St. Louis Rams, who were 14-point favorites.
But the winning didn’t stop there, and the Patriots returned to the Super Bowl eight times over the next 17 seasons, including three straight from 2017 to 2019. I was way past sick of them by then.
So it doesn’t surprise me that most of the country has gotten tired of Kansas City’s dynasty under Patrick Mahomes; gotten tired of seeing all of those commercials featuring Mahomes, coach Andy Reid, tight end Travis Kelce and assorted other Chiefs; and gotten especially tired of the cameras panning to Taylor Swift, Kelce’s famous girlfriend, nearly every time he catches a pass or the Chiefs score.
Just as the Brady haters always claimed he got the breaks from the referees, the conspiracy theorists now believe the same about the Chiefs and Mahomes, even when the controversial calls are upheld by replay officials. Statistics can never get in the way of a good conspiracy theory. I did note, however, that someone crunched the numbers and discovered that for the past three years the Chiefs have drawn more penalty yards than their opponents, have benefited from fewer crucial penalties than their opponents and have had only a small edge in penalty-yard differential in the fourth quarter or overtime games. If there’s a conspiracy among league officials to keep the Chiefs winning, it’s an awfully sophisticated one.
The dislike of the Chiefs may be as prevalent in Greenwood as anywhere because of their recent postseason mastery over the Buffalo Bills. There are a lot of Bills’ fans still here from the days when a super nice guy from Greenwood, the late Kent Hull, was playing center for Buffalo and went to four straight Super Bowls from 1991 to 1994. Sadly, the Bills didn’t win any of them, and they have been waiting for a return trip for more than 30 years, only to have the Chiefs stand in their way. In four postseason head-to-head matchups between Mahomes and the Bills’ own superstar quarterback, Josh Allen, the Chiefs have come out on top all four times, including two weeks ago in the AFC Championship game — the seventh straight year in which Kansas City has played for the AFC title.
Memories are short, and it’s easy to forget that Kansas City was an awful or jinxed team for a long while. It went 50 years, from 1970 to 2020, between Super Bowl appearances. During that span, there were stretches when it was a supreme test of loyalty to follow them.
After losing on Christmas Day 1971 to the Miami Dolphins in what is still the longest game in NFL history, the Chiefs only made it back to the postseason once over the next 14 years. When they finally became competitive again, they seemed cursed.
In 1995, they lost 10-7 at home in the playoffs to the Indianapolis Colts when Kansas City’s kicker, Lin Elliott, missed three field goals from under 50 yards. It was so cold that day, it was like kicking a rock, but many years later a Kansas City sports columnist still referred to Elliott as “the kicker who shall not be named.”
Almost two decades later, the Chiefs blew a 28-point lead against those same Colts, falling 45-44 in the playoffs. The second-half rally included a fluke play in which an Indianapolis running back’s fumble bounced off the center’s helmet and toward quarterback Andrew Luck for what turned out to be a 5-yard touchdown.
Maybe Kansas City has been overly blessed since the arrival of Mahomes, but its fans suffered mightily for quite some time.
On Sunday, the Chiefs will try to do what not even Brady’s Patriots or any other past NFL dynasty has been able to achieve. I will wear my lucky Chiefs socks and watch that game at home with just my wife and my son. We’ll cheer like heck, insulated from being obnoxious to anyone but ourselves, hoping the Chiefs can win a third straight Super Bowl.
If they don’t, we’ll live. So will most other Kansas City fans. If you’ve followed the Chiefs for long, you know you’ve been already rewarded more than you could have ever imagined.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
