Jets at Chiefs - Week 3 - Record: 2-1

Major professional team sports leagues don't like the Royals and the Giants.

Yes, I'm opening this post with a baseball reference, because these two teams have dominated major league baseball postseason play over the past few years. And as a passionate fan of both teams, watching them over that time and getting a feel for how they are considered through it all, I can tell...

The powers-that-be hate it.

In fact, they hate when any team keeps the Dodgers or Yankees from getting into postseason play. Boston teams are always an acceptable alternative, and maybe a handful of others whose players can be showcased as media darlings.

People don't think much about the advantages a team has being one of the most valued. Did you know that the last time there was a baseball playoff run without a Yankees team or a Dodgers team was 1993. Go ahead, look it up. This "failure" was so bad that 1994 was washed out so the major leagues could regroup to ensure the Yankees got back into things and the Dodgers did so often enough.

I also preface this post with all of this because Forbes recently put out its updated list of the most valued franchises in professional sports. Some of the teams are European soccer teams and sorry, that's soccer, it's way over in Europe -- doesn't count.

Sure enough, every team at the top of the list is from a major media market in a metro area with an extraordinarily large population. The No. 1 team is the Dallas Cowboys, but seven of the next nine are -- well -- I'll just name them, in order:

New York Yankees
New England Patriots
New York Knicks
New York Giants
Los Angeles Lakers
New York Jets
Los Angeles Dodgers

Not far behind are the Chicago Bears, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Bulls, Chicago Cubs, Boston Celtics, and Los Angeles Clippers. A handful of other teams showing up after them on the list are there because they've had recent winning runs that make them a bit popular at the present time.

Here's the thing. Fughedabowd getting any cred if you're a small market, media repulsed team like the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Chiefs, meanwhile, were listed at 43 overall on the list. At first I thought, woo-hoo! -- We're up there at 43rd! Not bad! (There're 122 major professional sports franchises in North America.) Well, more bad than you think considering that 27 of the 32 NFL teams all appear in the top 50. This means the Chiefs among NFL teams rank at 21st.  Now there really isn't much difference, however, between our value of $1.53 billion and the others in that latter range, so, not much of a big deal.

Tossing the outlier of the Cowboys, there still is quite a difference between that value and that of the Patriots at $3.2 billion. In fact, all these numbers started getting inflated a year ago after Steve Ballmer had to pay the racialist premium on the NBA's Clippers to ensure there was nooo racism among ownership by ponying up $2 billion for a team worth half that. They get more stratospheric the more they realize how much we're all willing to pay for gratification of our aggressions and vicariousnesses.

My point regarding our Chiefs and this season is in light of what's against us through all this is the Chiefs absolutely need that intangible, that major got-it intangible to truly set them apart from other teams. In fact I could express my deep concerns about this from the text of an email I sent to my uncle this week. I thought it'd work here, I'd like to share it with you here, now (a bit proofed and edited):

"Regarding our Chiefs, my main concern is how much this team has it in them to be true contenders--or how little as the case may actually be. I wrote a blog piece two years ago when we played an abysmal game against the Steelers late in the season that essentially cost us the playoffs, and the contrast couldn't be more stark. That is when I discovered there is a reason teams like the Patriots, Steelers, Packers, simply do not lose -- they simply come through in the clutch in the playoffs. When they don't it is because they may not have the talent that particular year or are suffering from injuries, but each of these teams have that extra something that keeps them winning on a consistent basis.

"I called it 'got-it', as in, these teams just have that something deep inside of them, something that courses through them from the top down that makes them win. Last night the Patriots, with a 3rd string quarterback, won a game handily against a Texans team that pasted the Chiefs just a few days before. This just makes me sad, because the Chiefs are an extraordinarily talented team that do win games on their talent, but damn it I just don't think they have nearly enough 'got-it' to win. Alex Smith is a phenomenally gifted, smart, versatile, athletic quarterback, but for cryin' out loud he just doesn't lead his team down the field enough times to win like the contenders do. 

"Sure I liked the San Diego game. But let's face it, the Chargers defense was exhausted in the second half. Last year when we won a lot of games in a row we played teams that for the most part were pathetic. We won the playoff game largely because the Texans quarterback was a joke. In 2013 we won a bunch of games in a row against teams that, if you noticed, were using their 2nd or 3rd string quarterbacks. Then we do things like hammer New England in 2014 and Denver last year on the road. What gives?

"Apparently our defensive backfield is our greatest weakness. What's with that? For so long it was a strength, and then suddenly it isn't? This is what drives me crazy, how do we keep losing our strengths? And how do the 'got-it' teams continue to win through their weaknesses? When, WHEN will the Chiefs have enough 'got-it'?

"That is really the issue. When I start seeing us do amazing things against teams at full strength, then I'll know. Otherwise I'll continue to be as sad as Chiefs fans have been for some time."

Here is my uncle's brief response, I don't think he'd mind if I share it:

"We just don't have the winning tradition, like we had in the early glory days. And I hate to say it, I felt Marty Schottenheimer was starting to bring it back with his insistence on, 'Defend Arrowhead' mantra. But I really don't think it has been revised. The teams you mention have the tradition we will win period."

Yes, it'd be nice to have the tradition, the talent, the leadership, certainly the "got-it", and definitely the having all that for years on end. But ultimately the issue with relation to this post so far is that this is hard to take advantage of those things when so many powerful people ravish themselves getting the power and money from this whole major professional team sports enterprise. It's as if we need double the amount of those things needed to overcome that.

Of course, really, that is one thing that makes this Chiefs fandom that much more valuable. We know we're up against it, and rooting for our team to do what it takes is more fun than rooting for the teams who get all the helpful establishment cred. It is what makes rooting for a Kansas City team that much more meaningful -- how splendid to see the tough, gutsy Royals beat the all-that New York Mets in the World Series last year.

Which brings us to today's game. 

Now just so you know, the New York Jets is not a New York team I dislike. I actually like them. They are old-AFL. They are Joe Namath. They are that underdog team that beat the vaunted Colts in Super Bowl III. They've also had a tough run of it even being a large market team, joining the Chiefs (with their small market) in never appearing in a Super Bowl since their respective splendid championship runs in '68 and '69.

What did this game look like for us with respect to all those items we'd like to see on a regular basis?

Well, for one thing, we got tons of breaks. We grabbed eight turnovers at the expense of a fumbly, intercepty Jets team. Their QB Ryan Fitzpatrick threw three interceptions in the red zone, six altogether after throwing only 15 all of last season. Two of the endzone picks were tipped -- wow did we get lucky. Another turnover was a fumble recovery on a kick coverage that went right into the hands of Demetrius Harris who then had wide open field to score.

 

On the other hand, we used our talent to stretch the field, yes. Travis Kelce was terrific. Jeremy Maclin started to get a bit more untracked. Chris Conley and Tyreek Hill made fine catches for good yardage at critical times. Alex Smith was once referred to by announcer Mitch Holthus as "the fighter pilot not ejecting" when staying in the pocket to complete a fine pass -- how great was that! And Spencer Ware was a wrecking ball out there -- very nice.

Thing is, we had all kinds of issues with the game of inches.

That's one of those key things that shows we've got the got-it, it really is. And the game of inches was a bitch for us today.

In the middle of the second half at some point, with the Chiefs up 17-3, we had that great talent-laden drive that ended with a fantastic Spencer Ware power run into the end zone... except...

Upon further review, Ware fumbled it into the endzone just as he was stretching the ball to the pylon. In fact, it was crazy, he barely barely barely lost the handle. It wasn't even an inch but a nanometer of his finger. No touchdown, still 17-3, Jets have the ball at the 20. New York took it all the way down to the Chiefs red zone but we did get one of those interceptions.

How about this one? Another episode of decent ball movement in the next series, and we get a 4th-and-1 at about the Jets 40. That's where you just have to go for it. We do, and Ware pounds it up the middle, only to be short by another of those inches. Jets get it back, they storm down, and we get another of those interceptions.

Whew, whew, whew.

We got so many of the nice bounces, but we so majorly benefit from them only because we're not up 31-3 already. It's still a close game at this time, and without the nice picks it's easily 17-17.

Then there are the bad calls against the Chiefs -- mmmmmm I'm telling ya. At a critical point Phillip Gaines was called for pass interference when the ball was not remotely catchable. In a later series Fitzpatrick threw a pass that should have been an illegal touching penalty against a Jets offensive lineman, but the officials just blew the call. Ergh ergh ergh.

Thing is, with just under five minutes left in the game, Fitzpatrick threw, yes, another interception.

And this leads to the one thing that you have got to heap loads of credit upon -- our defense. The Jets moved the ball all over the place pushing pushing pushing against our defensive guys, and yet we held. It is easy to say we got lots of breaks -- and we did, yes, in droves.

But the defense had something to do with that. And the stamina -- they were out on the field for 10-play drives in the second half over and over and over again. All of it capped by the wonderful, splendid, fantabulous

Pick-six by Derrick Johnson.

Our defense won this game. Even though they kept saying the Jets don't give up sacks, we had so much pressure on Fitzpatrick, both at the D-line and with our D-backfield stunts, that he threw six interceptions. That's big-time defense.

The offense was actually good enough to win it, it really was, but the inches game hurt us. And so, we're back to the beginning of this post...

Can we finish with the gravitas that a contending team has in droves?

Can we do that all the time, when we just KNOW this team has got it?

And we can show it in a reprieve game next Sunday against the Steelers, at Pittsburgh, on national television, Sunday Night Game of the Week, 5:30 pm (PST, for me, out here on the west coast).

Do we got it?

__

(Quick note about the font in this post. I have no idea why Blogger can't make consistent fonts throughout, but I've discovered that if I cut and paste something like those email passages, Blogger can't cope with keeping fonts the same consistency, and wrestling with it only does so much. I just can't seem to make the fonts consistent, no matter how much I tell it to, and what you see above has taken me literally about 20 attempts to get as good as it looks here. So yeah, there ya go, for what it's worth. This is as good as I'm going to get it with my limited computer abilities. At least the Chiefs won, there's that.)
__