Reid all about it: KC cheers a champion
Kansas City knows how to conduct a victory parade. It just doesn’t get much practice — 30 years between confetti showers for the baseball Royals and now this, after 50 years, for the football Chiefs.
How long has it been since the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, you ask?
—The Vince Lombardi Trophy, which the team received Sunday night, did not exist. Its namesake, coach of the first two Super Bowl championship teams in Green Bay, was coaching the Washington Redskins. After his death from cancer in September 1970, eight months after the Chiefs won Super Bowl IV, the National Football League provided Lombardi a fitting tribute.
—ABC’s coverage of Monday-night football, which changed TV viewing habits of a generation, was still months away in the first year of the newly merged NFL. The first MNF game matched the New York Jets, Super Bowl champions two years before and starring Joe Namath, against the Cleveland Browns, one of three NFL teams switching to the new American Football Conference. Two of the most despised Americans in 1970 were President Richard Nixon, for invading Cambodia with a war going in Vietnam, and Howard Cosell, whose ABC color commentary on Monday nights assaulted eardrums.
Compared to the Chicago Cubs, who went more than a century between World Series titles, a Kansas City Super Bowl triumph after 50 years hardly rates as a man-bitesdog story. But in a charming Midwestern city that took the AFL’s Dallas Texans in off the street in
1963, its longtime love affair with a professional football team centered around famous coaches and quarterbacks, where you can get some of the best barbecue west of the Mississippi River, everything, like Rodgers and Hammerstein said in “Oklahoma!”, is truly up to date.
The late Hank Stram, Kansas City’s head coach in the first and fourth Super Bowls, would have loved how the Chiefs “matriculated down the field” in the fourth quarter Sunday night. On cue, down by 10 midway through the fourth quarter, after coming from behind to win two playoff games, Patrick Mahomes rode to the rescue. KC’s first Super Bowl-winning quarterback since Len Dawson, Mahomes (a tender 24) became the youngest player named Super Bowl Most Valuable Player, a year after becoming the league’s youngest regular-season MVP.
What more can one say of the kid quarterback who was already starring with Aaron Rodgers in State Farm Insurance commercials!
Mahomes snatched it all from the hands of Jimmy Garoppolo, once New England’s quarterback-in-waiting behind Tom Brady. Airing it out more than in San Francisco’s two playoff wins, Garoppolo took the 49ers from a
10-3 hole to a 20-10 lead.
But like the great ones before him, Mahomes turned the fourth quarter into his personal showcase. Like a combination of Muhammad Ali punches, the kid quarterback floored the 49ers with three late touchdown drives, passing for two scores.
The game turned on a 44-yard toss to Tyreek Hill, alone in the San Francisco secondary, on the drive that made it 20-17. Thus inspired, the Chiefs’ defense began pressuring Garoppolo with the same intensity that the 49ers’ four-man rush brought against Mahomes, who for once in his young career looked unsure and threw two interceptions.
In a blink, it was 31-20, Travis Kelce and Damien Williams catching short touchdown passes and Williams, like John Riggins for Washington in a Super Bowl fourth quarter of yesteryear, with a knockout blow down the sideline.
“You know with six minutes left,” said Niners coach Kyle Shanahan, “that Mahomes is going to have two more possessions unless you keep making first downs.”
Jimmy Johnson, for one, on the Fox Sports telecast, said we have not seen the last of these 49ers, a club built on defense and a maturing quarterback (like Pittsburgh in
the 1970s with the Steel Curtain and Terry Bradshaw). One has a glimpse now why trading Garoppolo created such angst in the New England Patriots’ front office.
But borrowing a line from jockey Pat Day about the Kentucky Derby before he won the race with Lil E. Tee, this Super Bowl had Andy Reid’s name written on it.
Mahomes’ fourth quarter helped Reid remove the stigma, which he unjustly acquired in Philadelphia, of not winning the big one. Reid probably would have reached the Pro Football Hall of Fame without a Super Bowl title. Now, to use a baseball analogy, he’ll slide in without a throw.
Though not considered a master of clock management, Reid changed the tempo with a hurry-up offense in the fourth quarter. Then getting the ball back and 3 points down, Kansas City started working the clock in hopes of scoring again and leaving the Niners little time.
That’s one reason Andy Reid is being fitted for a Super Bowl ring. Another is that he saw the future in Mahomes, fresh out of Texas Tech, and traded (to Washington) Alex Smith, an overall No. 1 draft choice.
“How ‘bout them Chiefs!” Reid said from the podium, tweaking Johnson’s line about the Cowboys after his first of two Super Bowl titles in Dallas.
Chiefs owner Clark Hunt accepted the Lombardi Trophy from Commissioner Roger Goodell, whose Ted Williams look (open-collared shirt with no tie) did not wear well. Clark’s mom, Norma Hunt, attended her 54th Super Bowl, the first 40 with late husband Lamar, who founded the club and moved it from Dallas in 1963.
The Beatles were still a group (but not for long) the last time the Chiefs scaled this mountain. Beating Minnesota 23-7 at old Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, those Chiefs kept matriculating down the field with Jan Stenerud kicking three field goals and Dawson throwing to Otis Taylor for a touchdown and Mike Garrett running for another on “65 toss power trap.”
This is next to heaven in Kansas City, the Chiefs receiving the Lamar Hunt Trophy (as AFC champion) and the Lombardi Trophy in the same calendar year. Super Bowl LIV, by the way, fell on the first palindrome date, 0202-2020, in 911 years. Hopefully, it won’t be that long before KC celebrates another championship.