One of the truly endearing things about Clark is his loyalty to those given the task of nurturing the Chiefs Kingdom. It is a hallmark of the Hunt legacy. Yes this entire blog series is about examining this thing Hunt that somehow afflicts Chiefs success through the eons, and indeed when a power broker within the organization stays with an ineffectual operative for far too long, it is painfully detrimental.
On the other hand, Clark's loyalty can be a good thing. It means leadership has faith, patience, and confidence in you to get the job done. At times Hunt has done that well, at other times, not so well. Clark himself has always wrestled with when to move and when not to, and to his great credit he is always deeply contemplatively considering everything, the Chiefs and the individual, whenever he must make a difficult personnel decision.
Right now the braintrust is Clark-Brett-Andy. We'll talk much more about Brett in later posts, but for right now...
What about Andy?
Let's face it, Chiefs fans do consider themselves fortunate to have Andy Reid as head coach. He has led the Chiefs to winning regular season records for all five of his years with us. He does that with the quite accomplished qualities that enthusiastically encourage Clark to keep him signed and sealed for as long as he wants, really. Reid is genuinely terrific at managing the team, keeping all the pieces working as they should. The troops practice and play with purpose and they have a robust respect for the man -- a lot of that is because Reid demonstrates a vibrant appreciation for the contributions of each of his players. He is also a tremendously skilled play designer and game-plan arranger.
And from what I hear he's a genius working with quarterbacks. Chiefs fans are slavering to taste the fruits of Pat Mahomes' progress -- this is a veraciously exciting benefit of Clark's intensely deliberative style: Mahomes can be confident the Chiefs will stand by him. A work colleague mentioned that he'd recently seen on television ESPN guys analyzing the optimum quarterback-coach situations for next season, and they felt the Chiefs had the best one. Very very very cool -- who can't wait for next season to start?!
These are the areas in which Reid deftly excels.
But then there is the very bad Andy Reid. In three key areas Reid sticks out like a sore buttock. You know what they are.
First, he simply cannot be organic -- this is one of the critical factors to our continued playoff failures. Often in the heat of a postseason battle you must rely on your intuition and do things that might deviate a bit from the original plan, simply because you just know this player or that player can do something for you that you really need to win that game. This feature of good postseason coaching has been woefully absent in all four of our playoff losses in those five years, three of which were lost by a total of four points. For cryin' out loud Andy get your face out of that play-sheet once in a while!
Second, he simply does not make the right adjustments. Sure enough, before that playoff loss to Tennessee I predicted that to win, even against a much weaker team, Reid simply must make adjustments to counter their adjustments, even make further adjustments to adjust for their added adjustments. He didn't. He flat-out didn't like he didn't in those other playoff losses, and it relates to the failure to be organic because he stubbornly refuses to go in a direction that is not The Game Plan. This just kills us.
For a bit of the ugliness of that Tennessee game, you know we scored zero points in the second half. I went ahead and looked, checked to see if we'd ever done that in the regular season. Sure enough, we scored points in every second half of the regular season, quite a few even, averaging 13.4 second-half points over the 16 games. Yeah, go ahead: ::whimper:: The fewest second-half points we scored was in the Giants game, when we had 6. Horrible -- but at least we had 6! The most? That first splendid win against New England, we scored 28 second-half points. I hear more whimpering -- that's okay, I got ya.
Really, that Tennessee game was the most horrific evidence that Andy Reid just won't be organic or adjust as he should. Now maybe he can learn, maybe as he comes into his own as a veteran, seasoned, lion-of-the-NFL-coaching-fraternity with something left in the tank -- maybe he'll humbly dedicate himself enough to work at getting that going.
Third -- and you'll see this ties in with other two as well -- he won't admit when he's messed up. I did not watch it because it was too agonizing, but I'd heard about it and I'd seen a very brief clip of it, and it was painful -- in his post-game press conference he actually had the temerity to deflect responsibility away from himself and blame everyone else for not doing what they were supposed to do.
Excuse me, but this just destroys all that great leadership stuff you'd already engendered among the Chiefs Kingdom. Even if this guy or that guy didn't come through on the field, as a strong leader you take the hit.
I can't help but think of something notable in a Joe Montana biography I'm reading right now. In every instance he possibly could Montana would always give his players the benefit of the doubt and assume the responsibility for anything that went wrong. Sure he'd urge his players to do this thing or that thing, but whenever he did he gave them an enormous amount of confidence that he'd come through for them.
See, Joe Montana had that thing I've mentioned frequently before in this blog.
He had "got-it." It is what separates the winners from the also-rans, and I'm sorry, but there is a Chiefs arrowhead right next to the word also-ran in the dictionary.
I think back to the Alabama-Georgia NCAA football championship game this year played the Monday night after the Chiefs-Titans debacle. There you watched tons of got-it coach Nick Saban pulling his regular quarterback for a freshman who hadn't played a snap all year, a player who eventually led Alabama to the win for the title.
Huh, Andy Reid, really, shouldn't you have been truly organic in our game and put in Pat Mahomes when Alex Smith was simply not getting it done in the second half of that game? Showed the Titans a totally different look like Saban did to the very good Georgia defense? After all, we all saw what Mahomes did just the week before in mile-high conditions against one of the best defenses in the league. Did you miss that? For more on this, I had a special post in middle of the regular season related to our exasperation with Reid not going with Mahomes during the regular season when Smith was playing horribly.
Now maybe sticking with Smith was the right call then, I understand. Smith did finish the regular season well for us, that's fine.
But then I also think this. Here's the wrap-up to all of this.
How much of Reid's failures and the contemptible lack of got-it is because of Hunt?
Not Clark, just Hunt.
Stram was great -- there was still Hunt. Levy was a godsend -- we all know what Lamar did with that. Schottenheimer was amazing -- ahh, Hunt. Vermeil was incredible -- but, well, Hunt. Reid is a phenomenal coach -- Hunnnt.
Just a reminder, when Reid coached the Eagles from 1999 to 2012, the Eagles made the playoffs nine times and won at least one playoff game in the first seven of those times. His team won ten playoff games over that span, going to the Super Bowl in the 2004 season. For the Chiefs he's 1-4, already suffering three one-and-outs. Hunt?
Here's something I think about, another historical note that to me adds to the whole protracted intergenerational thing. To me it does, even though there is so much more, and so much I don't know or understand. But I'm sharing this particular item here anyway.
Go back to 1960, when Chiefs Kingdom started. Here's Lamar, a man who was nicknamed "Games" because of his passion for playing games and enjoying sports and desperately wanting to win -- here he is starting his own pro football team he certainly wanted to win all the time. But to make that meaningful he had to get a whole bunch of teams to win against, so of course he starts the AFL. If you were Lamar, what precisely would you want to have happen here?
Naturally you want your team to win most games by scores of 21-20 and be champions at least almost every year. Indeed Lamar probably had an edge because the AFL was his league created so the Texans-later-Chiefs would be successful. The franchise did have three titles in the ten years of the AFL's existence.
Here's the thing -- Lamar was sensitive to that conception. He wanted his darling team to win but he couldn't look at all like the whole thing was stilted in his favor.
Sure enough, in the very first game the Texans ever played in the entirety of the AFL -- Saturday September 10 1960 there in the Los Angeles Coliseum against the Chargers -- Lamar's team jumps out to a 20-7 halftime lead. He very openly declares at the time that maybe the Texans shouldn't be so dominant. Well guess what happened. Los Angeles came back and won 21-20. Lamar vows never to take anything for granted again.
There is just something about the psychic in that whole thing which to me has affected the Chiefs throughout their history.
I've been thinking about a couple more things I'd thought about a bit more from my last post that I feel are connected to this.
That the Chiefs have lost a playoff game to every AFL team except the Bengals (whom they've never played) at least once. Sorry, but that is just weird. Look, here's the record! -- the Chiefs postseason record by AFL team:
Boston (New England) 0-1
Buffalo 1-2
Cincinnati 0-0
Denver 0-1
Houston (Tennessee) 2-1
Los Angeles (San Diego) 0-1
Miami 0-3
New York 1-1
Oakland 2-1
Other teams (whom they've played):
Baltimore 0-1
Green Bay 0-1
Houston Texans 1-0
Indianapolis 0-4
Minnesota 1-0
Pittsburgh 1-1
Among all teams the only ones the Chiefs have played and not lost to are the Texans and Vikings. Meanwhile the Patriots Broncos Chargers Dolphins Ravens Packers and Colts have never lost to the Chiefs.
Then there is this one. There're those eleven seasons when the Chiefs have had a winning record but not made the playoffs. I thought about that too and thought, huh, really, is that a lot? Are there other teams with as many? I did then peek at just a few teams and found none that had as many as the Chiefs had. Now I didn't look at a Bears or a Cardinals, teams that've been around for almost 100 years, they've got to have quite a few. Maybe sometime when I need some distraction time I'll look at more teams, just to see.
But eleven winning seasons with no playoff appearance in 58 years of existence -- most of those seasons featuring ten teams entering the postseason -- that has to be a lot. What this means is the Chiefs have had a lot of 9-7 type seasons where one more win for a 10-6 mark would've gotten them in the playoffs. Which means that, likely --
Eleven times the Chiefs have had even more single heartbreak games late in a season that kept them from a shot at glory.
I can think of a few right off the top of my head.
There was 1996. We were at 9-4 after a convincing Thanksgiving day win over the Lions, then couldn't win another game. The last game of the season was in Buffalo and certainly within reach, but we couldn't get it done. We could've backed in with a 9-7 record, but the Falcons' Morten Andersen (a Hall-of-Famer who later even played for the Chiefs) missed a 30-yard field goal to let the Jaguars off the hook for that playoff spot instead.
How about 1999? We're at 9-6 and a win over the Raiders at home and we're in. We leap out to a 17-0 lead, then it gets tight for the rest of the game until their kicker ties it with under a minute left, then wins it in overtime.
Or even recently, 2014? In a game against Arizona with Kansas City ahead and in control late, Travis Kelce caught a pass deep in Cardinals territory that really would've iced the game. We win that game and we're 10-6, a record that would've qualified us for the playoffs. Instead after Kelce was lying flat on his back in firm possession of the ball, a Cardinals defender batted the ball out of his hands and the officials ruled it a fumble. Turnover, ball to Arizona, they march down, score, and eventually win.
Now I KNOW there are dozens of other instances when these kinds of things happen to other teams, I got that, I'm with you -- come on Dave what's the point...
The point is undeniably that this stuff afflicts the Chiefs far more than other teams.
And I KNOW there are a hundred other factors that afflict the Chiefs in these regards, many of them questionable things related to Hunt, several of which we can see and know about.
Some of those other things are related to the present NFL itself, and that will be the subject of my next post. Enough writing for now! Whew.
Until then...
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As I put this blog post together, major stuff has been going down with our team. I couldn't help but notice that the Chiefs are trading Marcus Peters, and have been working on this deal for some time. Major ramifications emerge from that, with some critical facets having to do with the way the NFL treats the Chiefs. It's all breaking right now, so we'll have some time to digest and then address more fully in next week's edition of "The Devastating Hunt..."
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(Episode IV)
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