Bucs, Browns, Bills out to follow footsteps of champ Chiefs
Aside from winning the final Super Bowl before the merger in 1970, the Kansas City Chiefs’ biggest claim to fame for over half a century was team founder Lamar Hunt coining the phrase Super Bowl.
Patrick Mahomes changed all of that a year ago when he led a furious fourth-quarter rally that sent the Chiefs to a 31-20 win over San Francisco in Super Bowl 54.
Now, there are Mahomes murals all over town, the city’s famous restaurants run specials in his honor and he even has a cereal named after him.
The Chiefs (14-2) are again a top seed and they’re one win away from becoming the first team ever to host three consecutive AFC championships. The only NFC team to do that was the Philadelphia Eagles from 2002-04 when Andy Reid was their coach.
Even after an excruciatingly long wait, a franchise’s fortunes can change
quickly.
Three long-downtrodden teams — the Browns, Bills and Buccaneers — have made it to the divisional round this weekend and are certain they have as good a chance as the Chiefs, Packers, Saints, Ravens or Rams of winning Super Bowl 55.
Brash Browns
In Cleveland, a strange season has turned surreal.
The Browns are playing football in January — not searching for a coach or general manager or trying to figure out what to do with one of their high draft picks.
After a nearly two-decade crawl, the Browns (125) are among the NFL’s elite, one of eight teams remaining with a shot at winning it all. That’s heady stuff for a franchise that has never made it to the Super Bowl.
Yet, under first-year coach Kevin Stefanki’s steady hand, the Browns have steered around one obstacle after the next and have taken off on a run few imagined.
They won 11 games to make the playoffs for the first time since the 2002 season. Then, with Stefanski unable to make the trip after he tested positive for COVID-19 and missing two other key players and four assistant coaches, the Browns won their first playoff game in 26 years last Sunday by stunning the rival Pittsburgh Steelers at Heinz Field, where so many Cleveland seasons had died previously.
They did it with Stefanski in his basement back home, and they finished off their first playoff road win since 1969 with a left guard who introduced himself to quarterback Baker Mayfield in the locker room before kickoff.
Stefanski took part in the postgame celebration on FaceTime in a scene that seems oddly perfect in a pandemic season of Zoom calls, protocols and social distancing.