The Sore Winners

An essay about unhappy Chiefs fans...

I moved to Kansas City in 1981 and way back then the Kansas City Star had season tickets that often went unused, possibly because the Chiefs hadn’t had a winning season since 1973 and after they somehow went 9-7 in ’81, didn’t have another winning season until 1986.

Do the math and that’s one winning season in 12 years, which will definitely dampen a fan’s enthusiasm.

During that losing streak I could go down to the Star’s HR Department and get two free Chiefs tickets because nobody else wanted them. Which I did fairly often because I considered Arrowhead Stadium a nice, quiet place to read the Sunday paper. I’d bring pastry, coffee and orange juice and spread out over several seats because pretty much nobody else would be sitting in my section and every once in a while I could look at the scoreboard, check out the game and see exactly how many points the Chiefs were losing by.

Back then the hot ticket was the Royals and only diehard fans cared about the Chiefs and just in case you’ve got short memories, as recently as 2012 the Chiefs had a 2-14 season.

But in 2013 Andy Reid arrived (a lot of fans hated his hiring because they didn’t think Andy could win the “Big One” but I was OK with hiring Andy because the way things were going I didn’t mind winning a few small ones) and the Chiefs went 11-5 that season and haven’t had a losing season since Reid’s arrival.

Next…

Patrick Mahomes arrived in 2017 (he played in one game that season) and while I’ve never actually “met” Mahomes or shook his hand, we did exchange words when he showed up at Kauffman Stadium wearing a Royals jersey and walked up behind me and when I turned around, at first I didn’t recognize him, but then realized he was the Chiefs new QB so I asked if he was there to throw out the first pitch.

Patrick said yes so I asked if he’d be more comfortable doing it if we had a couple guys try to tackle him while he threw the ball.

Patrick laughed and said no, he’d just do it the regular way and if you ask Patrick Mahomes about that encounter, he’ll say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” because I’m pretty sure Patrick Mahomes doesn’t walk around telling people about the day he met Lee Judge.

And As Long As We’re Strolling Down Memory Lane…

If you want to know how much you should worry about what people are currently saying about the Chiefs and Mahomes, go back and look at what they said in the past and here are what a few “experts” had to say when the Chiefs drafted Mahomes:

• “The Chiefs just made the dumbest move of the draft.”

• “He’s nowhere near ready to play in the NFL. And, honestly, he may never be.”

• “Mahomes’ inexperience running a traditional offense could stunt his growth at the next level.”

The guy who said that last thing listed his Top 5 quarterbacks in the draft and Patrick made the list at number five, but DeShone Kizer, Mitch Trubisky, Deshaun Watson and Davis Webb rated higher.

Now here’s what professional loudmouth (which is rich, coming from me) Stephen A. Smith had to say about the Mahomes pick:

• “Damn this. You’ve got to be kidding me. Patrick Mahomes gets picked over DeShaun Watson? Really. Why bother working out for these teams!!!”

BTW: All those quotes come from “experts” being paid by organizations like ESPN and USA Today and possibly the Khmer Rouge for their opinions and when my son Paul went to MU he took a sports journalism class and they brought in a guy from an NFL team to talk about sports coverage and the guy made the excellent point that if any of the media “experts” were actually good at analyzing players some NFL team would hire them.

Now here’s the article where I got those quotes:

https://www.kansascity.com/sports/nfl/kansas-city-chiefs/article248262295.html

So What Brought All This on?

According to an article by friend and former colleague – the Kansas City Star’s Vahe Gregorian – if you go on social media you’ll find plenty of complaints about the now 11-1 Chiefs because while the Chiefs are winning, according to some unhappy fans they’re not winning by enough points.

I believe the obvious lesson here is you shouldn’t go on social media.

OK, WAIT.

I gotta take that back because my stuff is on social media, so we need to come up with a Brand New Social Media Rule and maybe we could use the one employed by former Kansas City Royal and current TBS broadcaster Jeff Francoeur who once told me he read every article I wrote about the Royals, but never ever read the comments underneath and when I asked about his reasoning, Frenchy said:

“Why would I want that shit in my head?”

And I knew exactly what Frenchy meant because once I read a naïve/uninformed/just plain nasty comment I’d want to respond and explain why the comment was naïve/uninformed/just plain nasty, but then the commenter would respond to my response and we’d be off to the races and neither one of us would let the other one get the last word in which is pretty much how the Hatfield/McCoy Feud got started.

(OK, I just made that up, so I went online to see how the Hatfield/McCoy feud actually got started without the benefit of social media and it had to do with the Civil War and who shot who when and it’s pretty confusing so let’s move on because we already have enough on our metaphorical plates and miles to go before we sleep…although…the original protagonists were Asa Harmon McCoy and Devil Anse Hatfield and my kids are lucky I didn’t read about the feud before they were born because I definitely would have named at least one of them Devil Anse Judge.)

Anyway…

On Friday the Chiefs won another close one against the now 2-10 Oakland Raiders and this time they won because the Raiders center snapped the ball when the Raiders quarterback wasn’t looking, it bounced off the QB’s shoulder and the Chiefs picked up the fumble to seal the win and after a lifetime of watching NFL games this is at least the third time this season I’ve watched a Chiefs’ win and said:

“I’ve never seen a game end that way.”

The bizarre wins have people worried because how many times can you count on your opponent’s game-winning walk-off touchdown being disallowed because their receiver had a fraction of his foot on a fraction of the out-of-bounds line at the back of the end zone or blocked point-blank field goals or rookie centers drilling unaware quarterbacks with early snaps?

Kirk Herbstreit’s Analysis

One of the many things I love about sports is the game of adjustments: you do something that works, but then your opponent adjusts and stops that from working and then you adjust to their adjustment, ad infinitum which sounds like the number of Christmas TV commercials we’re going to see between now and December 26^th, but actually means “again and again in the same way; forever.”

Bad teams and people don’t adjust; they just keep doing the same thing even when it isn’t working and if you don’t believe me, take a good long look at your spouse. What we’re watching this season is the Chiefs making an adjustment to the adjustments made to them.

According to the kind of people who pay attention to this stuff and put it on the internet, in 2018 the Chiefs scored 35.3 points per game — the first year Mahomes started all the games — but this year it’s 24.1 which is the lowest it’s been since 2015 if you don’t count last season when it was 21.8 which, as you might recall, didn’t stop them from winning another Super Bowl.

https://www.statmuse.com/nfl/ask/chiefs-average-points-per-game-last-10-seasons

But 11.2 fewer points a game is not insignificant, so what’s the deal on that?

Friday’s game was covered by Al Michaels and Kirk Herbstreit and during the game Kirk (who played QB for Ohio State so he’s got a decent chance of knowing what he’s talking about) described what was happening with the Chiefs this season:

Defenses are playing their secondary deep and taking away the long bombs we like to see Mahomes throw, but if the secondary plays deep, short passes underneath are open and if a running back can get past the line of scrimmage, he can gain extra yardage before the deep secondary comes up to meet him.

Which means…

The high-scoring quick strikes are harder for the Chiefs to come by, so they’re taking what’s available and grinding out long drives and according to the internet the Chiefs are currently fourth in the NFL when it comes to time of possession.

But long drives mean fewer points and fewer points mean the margin of victory is also going to be smaller, but as pro athletes will tell you a win’s a win and they don’t give out style points unless you’re competing in the uneven parallel bars or running for president.

No idea what’s going on with the Chiefs defense because even though I played four years of high school football, NFL defensive schemes have gotten way more complicated since we wore those leather helmets.

But here’s something I do know.

It’s Always Something

For a certain kind of fan the glass is always half-empty and they’ll bitch about the water shortage and also the quality of the glass and wonder why their half-empty glass isn’t Baccarat Crystal and maybe that’s because I just looked it up and a Baccarat Crystal water goblet goes for $159. 95 which means I’m A-OK with drinking out of old jelly jars that may or may not have all the jelly scraped out of them.

So where were we before I got sidetracked by the Baccarat Crystal scam?

Right…people who always find something to bitch about.

I once walked around and asked every Royals coach and player the longest streak they could remember when a team was hitting on all cylinders – pitching, defense and hitting – and the longest streak anyone could recall was about a week-and-a-half.

So it’s always something and as Vahe pointed out in his article, even the years the Chiefs won a Super Bowl something was going wrong and had to be overcome which is maybe why there’s only been one undefeated season in NFL history – the Miami Dolphins in 1972 – and some panicky Dolphin fans were probably bitching about their team only beating the Buffalo Bills 24-23 that year.

I’ve got no clue what will happen next and the Chiefs clearly have problems with their offensive tackles and maybe that’ll get solved and maybe it won’t, but we should definitely be happy about a team that hasn’t had a losing season since 2012 and is always in the playoff hunt and been to four of the last five Super Bowls and won three of them and if that’s not enough I wish we had a time machine and I could take some of those unhappy fans to a Chiefs game in 1982 to read the Sunday paper.

Today’s Lesson

Currently, there’s a trend of pro athletes bypassing the traditional media and speaking directly to the fans and I’m all for that because I don’t need yet another lame sideline reporter asking what a win “says about this team” so I’d much rather watch Peyton and Eli Manning talk about football.

Recently they had all-around fun guy Bill Belichick on with them and they were talking about the Chiefs when Eli said this season they weren’t exactly playing “Chiefs football” but were still finding ways to win and Bill said:

“That is Chiefs football.”

It wasn’t always, so maybe we should appreciate it when a team is going good and realize it doesn’t last forever and my brothers out in California are fans of the 5-7 49ers and trust me, they’d take a couple fluke wins.

(My brother Dan has also expressed the hope that complaining and overly-whiney Chiefs fans manage to get Kansas City defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo fired because Dan thinks the 49ers could really use him.)

Bottom line:

The Chiefs are good enough to stay close and make blocked points and early snaps and guys with one toe on the line matter and, trust me, after a lifetime of watching sports, hot streaks don’t last forever and when you’re in one, however you got there, you oughta be grateful.