Once-tortured Chiefs revel in bid to repeat
It’s a daunting enough quest to win one Super Bowl every 50 years or so — as any once-tortured Chiefs fan and hundreds of players to come through Kansas City in between championships can certify.
But a second in a row is a geometrically more ambitious and elusive pursuit, affirmed by the fact that only eight teams have repeated and none since New England went back-toback in the 2003-04 seasons.
And it might be said that any of the teams that did repeat did so in a considerably less disorienting time than the Chiefs have in now extending their #Runitback drive campaign to the so-called ultimate game by drubbing Buffalo 38-24 in the AFC Championship Game Sunday night at Arrowhead Stadium. So before we turn to the game that will define this season, their matchup against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tom Brady in Super Bowl LV on Feb. 7 in Tampa, let’s exhale a second here and try to put in context what it means just to ascend back to this tier a year later … amid a pandemic.
This has unfolded against the grain, against the gravity of history and, really, against incalculable broader odds with the pandemic all around.
Safe to say coach Andy Reid still was processing it all late Sunday night after his team became just the third to even return to appear in a Super Bowl since the Patriots repeated.
“When I get about two seconds to sit down, I’m going to sit there and I’m going to go, ‘Doggone, how about this one? ’ ” he said, a bit giddily.
“This one” will be framed for posterity in history books by both the troubles of the times and this team’s ability to adapt — all the more so if the
Chiefs join the few and the proud to repeat.
“I think in the spring and early summer, many of us had a lot of uncertainty about how this (season) was going to unfold,” Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said Sunday night. “I don’t think we knew for sure that you could play football safely, that the virus would not be passed on the football field. Those were just things we didn’t know, and it was really a step-by-step process for the league and all the teams to figure out how to do it this year.”
General Manager Brett Veach has grown up in the NFL under Reid’s eyes but now is very much his own man. That was demonstrated long ago in, say, his incessant imploring of Reid and GM predecessor John Dorsey to go after Patick Mahomes. And it’s been affirmed many times since, whether in terms of the talent he keeps replenishing to the long-term deals for Mahomes and Travis Kelce and Chris Jones that he and his front-office brainiacs made work in the offseason.
Asked Monday about the few things he believes are most crucial to this repeat bid (casually called “this tour that we’re on” by defensive end Frank Clark), Reid pointed first to Veach’s resourcefulness in keeping the team “as whole as he possibly could.”
That continuity was further enhanced by an intact coaching staff, and it’s hard to say there ever were a season that would put more of a premium on such stability and flow as this one. From offseason training disruptions to rejiggered locker-room formats to safeguard against COVID-19, so much was discombobulated in the day-to-day routines that most coaches consider vital, if not paramount.
“I can’t speak highly enough about the job that Andy has done the entire year,” Hunt said. “This year had more challenges and more distractions than any football year in recent memory, and Andy did a great job of leading them through that, keeping them focused, and the performance tonight showed it.”
If we’ve gotten used to some of the procedures, well, Reid reminded us of just one little aspect of the profound differences Monday.
“Just the fact that I’m talking to you guys” on a Zoom call, he said, smiling and adding, “I get to see dogs jumping on people and this and that. It’s wild.”
Also wild in a certain way was the manner in which the Chiefs came to win: far less by the accustomed gaudy offensive outpourings than by complementary football that essentially relies on contributions from both sides of the ball. To a degree, we saw that down the stretch last season as the defense assumed a key role on the way to the Super Bowl championship. But it became all the more so this time around, manifested in a franchise-best 14-2 regular season marked by eight victories by six points or fewer.
Then they flexed the same dynamic in their playoff opener against Cleveland, a 22-17 victory.
Positive trait that such wins are, especially as they become part of a team persona of faith and resolve, some may have seen that as vulnerability and even perceived the Chiefs were in distress when they were down 9-0 against Buffalo.
But between winning the way they did and the muscle memory of three rallies from double-digit deficits last postseason, anyone following them closely would have known they’d be unfazed.
Or as Clark put it, that was just “a little Chiefs’ football for you” to keep people on the edge of their seats.
Just like all season, against not just the wave of the recent past but myriad X-factors no one could have foreseen even a year ago.
The grand finale to it all remains, of course.
But let’s appreciate that this was something in itself for the Chiefs and Kansas City, particularly in this crazy time.