No Chiefs Playoff Game Again - But Great Reminiscing About Our Best Seasons!

I'm chomping at the bit to get into so many things regarding pro football and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Again I want to get into what the deal is with the AFL, sometime. Again the old-AFL teams are sucking, today it was the Broncos collapsing. I didn't see any of it except for the very end of regulation when with a half-minute left the Broncos safety completely blew the coverage allowing a Ravens receiver to catch a 70-yard game-tying touchdown pass. I know the Ravens went on to win it. I could go into all of it much more, as I have, but the curse against the entire AFL is still raging big-time.

And the thing about all this is I am about halfway through Michael MacCambridge's book on Lamar Hunt. I can't deny that I am eagerly looking for anything, anything that would portend why his prized possession, the Kansas City Chiefs professional football outfit, has just been so abysmal through the years particularly in light of the fact that for some of those years we've had pretty dang great teams.

I'm just not finding anything conclusive. Are we just that unlucky? Are we just that inept in putting together a team that actually gels together on the field? Is it as simple as we just haven't drafted and developed a studly quarterback ever?

Well, there is a lot to write about, and I will at some point, but today is just a day to share with you my considerations for the five very best Chiefs seasons ever, ranked from five all the way up to No. 1 (Bet you can't guess what that season was!...)

So without further adieu, here is

The Best Kansas City Chiefs Seasons Ever

5. 1966

As poor as the Chiefs have been through their fifty years with really making anything happen playoffs-wise, it was a bit of a challenge to come up with just five to call the best. You'll note that not on the list are fine years like 1986 (a final-regular-season win getting us a splendidly surprising playoff spot), 1991 (beating the Raiders at the end of the regular season then again the very next week in the playoffs), 2003 (a sizzling 9-0 start), or 2006 (just for what happened on that one single day: New Year's Eve of that year).

I could not refuse, however, to put the 1966 season on the list even though I personally knew nothing about it. I was five years old then and just paid no attention at all to any of this. I do know that we hammered the defending AFL champion Bills in the playoff game for the AFL title, and I do know that the win catapulted us into the very first Super Bowl of them all. Only thing is we got hammered ourselves by the Packers.

4. 1990

Yes, this was a year when the Chiefs suffered not one but two of the team's most devastating losses of all-time. Yes, two in one year. How did it make the list?

Well, it was because outside of those two losses, really, everything about this year was ethereal. We'd just come out of the first full year of the Carl Peterson-Marty Schottenheimer era, 1989, when we played well and actually finished with a winning record. What a refreshing thing to have happen after the thoroughly atrocious 70's and 80's.

We watched Derrick Thomas explode on everyone. We watched Christian Okoye rumble over everyone. And we watched Steve DeBerg have the season of his life, throwing for I think was 23 touchdowns to only 4 interceptions. What? Steve DeBerg?

The clincher about DeBerg was how he played down the stretch, with that broken finger. Do you remember how he played like crazy to win the final regular season game at Chicago, with the cast on that finger waggling around? He played like it didn't even bother him. His sublimely gutsy play for our Chiefs is one of the prime reasons this season is on the list.

Sadly, it isn't higher because of those two awful games. One was at home against Seattle when Derrick Thomas was busy setting the single game record for sacks with seven, only to have Dave Kreig elude the eighth and throw a game-winning TD pass with no time left to win it for the Seahawks. I don't think I'd ever been as shellshocked as I was immediately after any regular season Chiefs game as I was after that one.

If we'd have closed this game out like we should have, we'd have had a 12-4 record instead of 11-5, would've won the division and avoided having to play Miami on the road in the first game of the playoffs. That by the way was the second game, one in which we were ahead 16-3 as the fourth quarter began, and, well... Ahem, we're only talking about the good things about this season, aren't we.

I have to add one of those good things that makes '90 so special is that it started an unprecedented string of six straight playoff appearances for the Chiefs. It would've been eight if not for one missed chip-shot field goal that would've allowed the Chiefs to back into a playoff spot they themselves blew a chance to get in 1996, but still.

3. 1993

This was Joe Montana's first year of two with the Chiefs, and what a phenomenally enjoyable year it was for Chiefs fans. Right away the team did exceptionally well, going a long way to show that Joe still had it. The team never lost two games in a row and won the division. Joe got help through the year from also-very-fine quarterback Dave Kreig, but overall he really did a lot to reinvigorate Chiefs football, not just for Kansas City and Chiefs fans, but for all of the NFL and professional sports.

He certainly showed his skills where he made the biggest name for himself, in the postseason. First he took care of Pittsburgh, throwing a strike to Tim Barnett in the back of the endzone on the last play of regulation to lead to the overtime win. Then he carved up Houston when their defense was all we heard about the entire week.

There have been only two seasons in Chiefs history -- yes, alas, it is true, only two -- that have seen at least two playoff wins by the Chiefs, and this was one of them.

2. 1981

What a magical, magical season this was. We didn't make the playoffs because we just weren't good enough, but even so, the thrill of seeing our Chiefs blast out to an 8-4 record was unparalleled. Just because we'd been so pathetically mediocre for so long. Just because we'd utterly pasted the Raiders twice. Just because we were playing with such heart and soul.

And just because we got to marvel at Joe Delaney.

One of the things I've discovered in Lamar Hunt's biography is just how tragic our Chiefs history is. I'd known about what happened to Mack Lee Hill, and there was the stunning Derrick Thomas accident, and of course this year there was the Jovan Belcher horrificness, but I hadn't any idea about this young player Stone Johnson during the earliest Chiefs years, a player who broke his neck in a game and later died.

Of course there was Joe Delaney. The heroically tragic nature of what happened to him makes this season easily one of the most bittersweet, and every one of even the most nominal Chiefs fans knows it.

1. 1969

To no surprise to anyone, the one year we won the Super Bowl is tops, by far.

Yes, I could say a bazillion things everyone already knows about it. I'm not, just because the placement here is exactly as it should be -- nothing could keep it from being most justifiably right here. I just don't have to try to argue for it. Much of why is just for you to see all the other picks of mine for No.s 2 to 5 for you to enjoy revving up your thinking about whether you agree or disagree.

I have to say it is hard not to regale the masses with the splendor that is Super Bowl IV: Jan's long field goals crushing the Vikings' spirit early, Hank's ingenious game plan famously highlighted by his delightful sideline loquacity ("65 toss power trap"!), that Dawson-to-Taylor quick-out touchdown pass to clinch it - a play indelibably planted in our minds as the hallmark of Chiefs greatness.

Well, I guess I did right there end up saying some things about this, but there is so much more.
I'll just finally add this.

I whine and moan and complain about the terrible stuff that has happened to the Chiefs through the years. But hey, we're entitled to do that. I go crazy with my obsessively querulous inquiries into what exactly is going on over there at Arrowhead. But hey, it's a hobby of mine. I'm convinced it is something, something: the most rotten luck or the dullest thickheadedness about drafting a quarterback or some curse or some conspiracy or the due punishment for H.L's bigamy coming back to kill us year after year after year.

But there is still 1969.

We had everything going for us, everything came together as it should, and we turned the football world upside down.

No matter what, that year vindicated Lamar Hunt and all his hard work to bring a fine thing to the people of Kansas City, as well as -- even more significantly for that matter -- to all who work for or just plain enjoy professional sports.

And I'd say that is a lot more people than even that. So far the book makes it clear, but, hey, I'm still reading...
_

(For the record: As you know I am reading Michael MacCambridge's biography of Lamar Hunt, and in his narrative about the 1990's he pointed out that the Montana-Young "revenge" game happened in 1994. I had originally put that it had happened in 1993. I've since excised that reference from the 1993 portion of this blog post. My apologies.)