Chiefs Game Last Sunday

I felt the need to write another post about last weekend's events, as they were.

I'd realized that a thread I'd been using in this blog just before the weekend was about this question:

What exactly is the worst thing that can happen to the Chiefs?

Insane, really, when I think about it. The timing of it.

I thought I really should qualify that, because there are a lot of things way worse than losing a few football games. Of course one of those things is what happened Saturday.

What could even be worse than that is how much we've been finding out as the full story emerges about what was really going on with Jovan Belcher and his relationship with his girlfriend. That story involves discovering quite dysfunctional behavior on Jovan's part that could have been bright red flags for what actually happened. What should we make of this? Were the Chiefs and the NFL complicit in some way by not taking more substantive action in all this?

This is hard to say because also revealed was that the Chiefs organization itself was helping Jovan and his girlfriend by providing help and counseling for them. In this sense then the Chiefs were doing all they could to help Jovan, and it is obvious that they always did have very high regard for Jovan. What are you going to do? Jovan still did what he did, made the choices he did.

The NFL complicity could be seen in the possibility that any pain Jovan was enduring -- pain that derives from the physically demanding and often brutal aspects of the game -- had reached a level which Jovan could no longer tolerate. This is the whole Junior Seau and Dave Duerson effect -- these were players who also took their own lives presumably because the prospect of continuously living with football-generated chronic pain became intolerable.

What to do with that?

Yes, the extremes range from a complete ban on the game to doing nothing more and allowing players in this extraordinarily fast and furious sport to be subject to more near-lethal injuries. Or perhaps someday there on the field there will actually be a lethal one. Well, in a real sense several players have experienced that lethality, just much later in life.

I must say that as a fan I do struggle with this. On the one hand we do need to be in there in life getting messy and dirty with it -- football is great with that. I wrote about that earlier. But then how far do you go until it gets to be simply too dangerous for thoughtful, considerate, civilized people to do?

There is so much more to talk about regarding all this. There's the whole controversy about guns and gun control, but I'm just not going to get into that here, now.

All I'm saying is that while we may not fully be able to articulate the very worst of the worst things that could ever happen about some thing or all things, there are some things worse than others.

Yes, this blog is about bitching and moaning about how awful the Chiefs are without a solid coach and studly quarterback. That's a pretty crappy thing, it is.

But there are worse things.

No matter how much longer the Chiefs are bad, and if it's a long time that's a very bad thing indeed, but no matter what happens on the field...

What happened Saturday and all the terrible news about how it happened and why it happened and what happened when it happened and all the stuff that's happening now and what's left to happen -- hey, there's that three month-old baby still with no mother or father -- all of that is way worse.

It goes without saying, really.

But sometimes we just have to talk about it, like I need to here in a blog post.
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