Just another quick blog about one of the coolest coolest way coolest things about winning the Super Bowl.
You're on the NFL Network incessantly. It is like 24/7 Chiefs for weeks afterwards.
This weekend I turned on the TV just to see what crazy-great Chiefs would be on, and sure enough, definitely one of the craziest-greatest things you could see.
The Mahomes Marathon.
What makes that such a crack-up -- please: an astoundingly delightful crack-up you know -- is that Mahomes has played in a mere 36 games as the Chiefs starting quarterback. And yet there is enough in his resume to have a whole television marathon of his games.
I took this snapshot of my TV at a moment when Mahomes was looking to the sideline for a play, and the expression is terrific -- it appears he too is going "Guh? I have a TV marathon? Already?"
Too much fun.
There was also this. I like NASCAR -- I'm in a NASCAR fantasy league with my own stable of drivers, and I love fast cars and enjoying fast cars racing each other. One of my favorite drivers was Jeff Gordon, and now he's in the booth as a color commentator for the FOX broadcasts.
I suddenly caught him there with a Chiefs jersey on! Guh? But then I remembered, Gordon was originally from the Bay Area, and was likely rooting for the 49ers when he'd made a bet that if the Chiefs won he'd wear the jersey.
Wonderful!
One of the interesting things about this snapshot is what is there in the booth. Look.
One of their monitors, this one showing the scene we're watching on TV. Of course in that screen is that same monitor, and then... and so on and so on and so on -- for infinity.
There is no way I can make another post without the confessional. I'm not afraid to do it, I know most Chiefs fans have to.
I have indeed ranted and railed a number of times at Chiefs leadership for any number of things we've all seen, yet much of it comes from the exceedingly high expectations we've all had for this team. Thing is, it is very difficult to win in the NFL -- 32 teams play a slough of games every year and only one emerges as Super Bowl champion. To lay all of our past failures at the feet of Andy Reid or Clark Hunt is somewhat unfair.
It doesn't mean we fans and pundits and bloggers can't feel it sometimes. To my own credit, I've always had the most hope that Chiefs Kingdom would thrive beyond whatever observations I've had about this misstep or that poor decision, whether on the field or in the front office. And while I have often been very harsh on people like Andy and Clark, I've always respected their character and the many things they do well. I've also shared very clearly that, hey, wow, this whole enterprise is supposed to be a fun thing. If I screech about some baaad Chiefs thing no matter how emotionally visceral, it really is just that -- just me venting, just me doing the therapy.
So yeah, my confession is that my abrasive approach was not justified in many instances, because when you look at the entire picture of what Andy and Clark have done together, the Chiefs Kingdom has been built with a very strong foundation and we tend to take that for granted when watching some single turnover or poor officiating call however crushing it is in a given game.
Again, the nature of the way NFL football works tends to get any fan of any team to think things are worse than they really are. For Chiefs fans it has always been quite pronounced, with all the tremendous misfortunes that have befallen us in playoff football. That's all well-documented.
But it is interesting, I look at a team like the Saints, who for a second year in a row lost a playoff game because of a pass interference call not made. Yes, I'm sorry, but the Vikings Kyle Rudolph totally pushed off his defender when he caught the game-winning TD in their playoff game. In the Super Bowl George Kittle's OPI penalty was totally justified, but how many times have the Chiefs just not gotten that call?
How many times have we thought those playoff rotten-call things have only happened to us!
I look at a team like the Ravens, scorching the NFL with a 14-2 record this year but faltering in their first playoff game. Sounds so Chiefs-like. One time I even looked at the regular season vs. playoff records of the Chiefs and Ravens and found the Chiefs had a better regular season record than the Ravens but the Ravens had such an amazing playoff record and two Super Bowl wins.
Not fair!
Well, of course it required people like Andy and Clark and all the other Kingdom contributors to make it so the Chiefs would be so good that they could indeed turn the tide and win a Super Bowl.
And that's a big part of it, just that the Chiefs have done something I mentioned in a number of posts as the one real thing that would get us to the Big Dance. That is that we've built this environment of winning, of got-it, of a -- to steal the phrase from the Raiders -- commitment to excellence that is real and rich and meaningful.
That's what the difference is in Kansas City, and it cannot be emphasized enough, it was due in the largest part of all because of all the work Clark has done and all the things he put in place so that so many others could contribute what they could. And yes, at the top of that list of people is Andy Reid, who I know I've taken for granted the leadership skills he has employed to get us not only to the promised land, but conquering it, as Mitch Holthus so wonderfully declared as the Super Bowl wound down, "The Chiefs Kingdom has firmly planted its flag on top of football's highest summit."
Funny, I have to add this just right now. I peeked at some of my ferocious remonstrations during that horrific losing streak at the beginning of the 2015 season, remember that? At one point I said, something like, "Well, let's just look to 2019." Huh.
We simply can't lose sight of the eternally truthful truth that often we must go through it before we get the rapture of great achievement. All those things happening to the Kingdom that made it so agonizing, for such an interminably length of time, in some very real sense had to happen so eventually we would get all the pieces in place to do what we did that Sunday a couple weeks ago.
It's really a good lesson for us all.
How awesome is this Kingdom.
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The image of Andy Reid and Jim Nantz above was from The Athletic. Thank you.
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Will Patrick Mahomes dominate the NFL for the next decade?
This is the question that seems to be consuming the post-Super-Bowl world. It is definitely wonderful to hear, no matter how valid the concern. Oh don't get me wrong, we all believe it is a genuinely valid concern.
All the crazy stats about how good he's been -- I saw a tweet from Rani Jazayerli, fine Chiefs and Royals fan pundit, that pointed out how no NFL team has ever put up 31 points or more in five straight playoff games. This Mahomes-led team did, and while much of it is indeed the coaching and the on-field weapons, we all got that -- that fact that we have this quarterback leading the charge means a ton.
Thing is, this Kansas City team is not from a media-darling large-market location -- even though the NFL seems to be perfectly happy with Mahomes' future possible -- some think certain -- success because of his immense talent, robust leadership, and splendidly personable nature. I'm sure they'd rather he play for the New York Jets, I'm sure of it.
This is why even after I've railed against everyone being against us because we aren't that media-darling large-market franchise I still hold to that position in spite of the Chiefs phenomenal success of late. For one, look at the team we had to assemble to win it all! Indeed is wasn't just that we had one of the best young quarterbacks ever in NFL history. It required a future Hall-of-Fame coach, a youthfully vibrant and incredibly insightful general manager, a stacked team of exceptional players, and of course a seasoned resilient owner to persistently build an energetically positive environment for it to all come together.
And secondly when I think about the stars lining up for our team to get a Patrick Mahomes, I do think about how viciously they lined up against us for years and years and years regarding our drafted and developed quarterback situation. It was as if all that rotten luck in all the previous NFL draft day poker games went 180 degrees in the opposite direction and we were delightfully dealt a royal flush on that spring day in April 2017.
So yeah. No apologies about our future dynasty, none at all. It will certainly not be as overwhelming as people seem to think, but hey. That they're all thinking it and we get to enjoy its potentiality now, that's a tremendously joyful thing right now.
I haven't even gotten to much of all the amazing things I've seen over the past week, and I'm blogging now just to say that I hope to get to some of it some time. I just have so little time, but when I do, I'll put a bit more down.
I must confess again here in this blog that my two favorite professional sports teams are the San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Chiefs, though not necessarily in that order. But those are the two, the two top ones. As I thought about our glorious achievement of late, I was thinking... huh...
The Giants won their first World Series, at least the San Francisco version of the team, in late 2010. The Chiefs capped the decade winning here in early 2020. But the dates. Look.
The Giants beat the Texas Rangers for the title on 11/01/10. The Chiefs won the Super Bowl last Sunday, the date: 02/02/20. That is just a wild numerology to me. They'd mentioned it was Andy Reid's 222nd game. Crazy. Each team had also gone 50 years between their titles, for the Giants it had been 56 years.
They also showed this nifty factoid graphic on the TV broadcast: The longest each coach/manager of the four major North American professional sports league had gone before winning a title. Of course Andy Reid was the one for the NFL, the highest of the four at 22 years. The major league baseball one? Bruce Bochy, manager for 19 years before the Giants won.
Bochy was one of the best managers I've ever seen do his thing. He made the most genius in-game maneuvers, and was one of the critical reasons the Giants won three titles in five years. It is not much different than what we see with Andy Reid, truly one of the best playmakers ever. For these guys to last this long shows their tremendous perseverance, and it must also mean they're pretty damn good leaders in their fields.
And then there were the superstars. Patrick Mahomes was MVP last year and Super Bowl champion this year, funny, the Giants best pitcher was Tim Lincecum who had won the Cy Young award the two years before his championship contribution.
Again, so much to blog, and when I have time I will. But I wanted to add one more thing really quick here.
Just that we won the 4th quarter, and won it big. I mention this because of all the contemptibly painful 4th quarters of playoff disaster after playoff disaster throughout Chiefs history. It was as if all that agony was vomited up in Miami and sucked into oblivion over the course of that beautiful, glorious, spectacular 8:00 hour CST on Sunday.
And then there was the game of inches. Sorry detractors, but Damien Williams' go-ahead touchdown was a touchdown. There were some who said, "Well, after the review the ref just said 'Call stands' which means there wasn't conclusive evidence to overturn the call on the field." Ahem, yeah, shut up -- there was conclusive evidence. The replays clearly showed that the ball did cross the goal line a half-second before his foot went out of bounds.
I say this, first because there were a number of things detractors said about the Chiefs lucking out on calls. For example some say Ben Niemann had a helmet-to-helmet hit on their QB forcing him into an incompletion at a critical time late in the game. Sorry -- not the case here either. The replay shows his head was straight up on a clean tackle and it hit just below the QB's helmet. It was the perfect non-call that we had not gotten for so, so many postseason instances before.
But the main reason I bring this up is because I'd always thought about how many times we'd been hosed by virtually impossible plays the other team makes by the scantest of inches. I'd always feared, wow, when will we need a delightfully insane crucial play like that, and we just barely don't get it to our interminable despair... ::Sigh::
Well, in Super Bowl LIV, WE GOT IT.
Yes, there is no doubt, while Williams' touchdown was certainly veritable, it was by the barest of margins.
So yeah.
Ahhh... We won the game of inches this time!
And just one more weird fun thing. In my devotional reading this morning, I got to the 36th chapter of Genesis. Believe it or not, and I'd never recognized this -- I've been reading the Bible for 40 years! -- but there are 32 different chiefs mentioned there. Yes, "chiefs"! Go look! 32 of them! Just about enough for a pretty decent pro football team.
Go Chiefs!
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The photograph of Andy and Patrick is from Mark J. Terrill of AP. Damien's touchdown is from Mark Humphrey of AP. Thank you.
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I have a whole off-season to post just on this. Yes, I have written so much about the misery -- I once even called the Chiefs "The Achilles Team of the NFL." Not unjustified, but it was all good therapy.
Now, the joy.
Just thinking of that television shot of that sea of red, all the people at the Power and Light District, watching them gain steam, gradually hands going up, more mouths opening wide, until the crescendo finishes with ferociously waving arms and deafening shouts to the sky. This shot of the crowd of fans back home far from the game site was different from all the others, because you know they were showing everyone reacting to Damien Williams' dagger 38-yard touchdown run to finish it off.
It was transcendent.
It was pandemonium in our home. I can confidently say when Williams completed his run to glory, there were no fewer than 800 million trillion gazillion Kingdom homes where exactly the same thing was happening. I can't wait to see the video compilation of all the places going wild at that exact moment.
The crazy thing is the joy is so much more intense and the feeling so much more euphoric because of all the past mishaps. It is kind of a perverse idea, something I'd mentioned a couple years when reflecting on all the dejection. There's got to be something to all this. And sure enough, there was. Not only did it get these guys -- most notably Clark, Brett, and Andy -- to put everything they had into getting it right, but it made the moment just plain simply that much greater.
Again, I want to blog a lot on all of this, and will. I want to talk about all the insane things people have been saying along the lines of "The Chiefs didn't win the game as much as the 49ers lost it." Excuse me? I'd like to get into the game and the season for sure, the history a bit, the legacy a bit more, and the magnitude a lot. When I can I will for sure.
For now, I found it quite intriguing that the day we did it was February 2, Groundhog Day. In there was actually one of the better commercials featuring Bill Murray and Punxsutawny Phil experiencing rapturous joy reliving every day bopping around in a particular vehicle they were trying to sell.
Hmm.
Think about that for a minute.
Is this just the first day of a lifetime of reliving this kind of a moment in future Super Bowls? Now I know we should just enjoy the moment, for now, for today -- and we all are. And I know everyone is saying we'll be in more even though it is very very very hard to do this in the NFL, yeah yeah, we got that.
But could we also right now, with a very young stud general manager and very young stud quarterback and very-young-at-heart stud head coach -- could we just also after the first of what could be repeated Groundhog Days of Chiefs Super Bowl glory just soak in that ecstasy for a bit too?
All those years when we had stratospheric hopes and came up short. And here today when we finally got it done, when we had all the got-it in the world in a game when Patrick Mahomes was not on his game.
The Kingdom picked him up.
Oh my. And we did it AGAIN.
We were down 10, in the 4th quarter no less. And we scored 21 freeking points in the 4th quarter. In the last 6 freeking minutes of the game no less.
I simply cannot blog too much right now because I want to spend this moment with my family and just watching the Kingdom celebrate. More later.
For now...
THIS IS INCREDIBLE! __ Photo from the official Chiefs website, thank you. ___
I don't think I've ever blogged at halftime. But this is the Super Bowl. And because these silly halftime shows last forever, I can pound out a few thoughts.
It is 10-10, and the Chiefs are perfectly capable of getting the lead and pulling away. The Niners are very tough, but there are a lot of positives here.
Adjustment ideas.
Hand the ball to Damien Williams straight up the field. Go ahead and do some misdirection, but give the ball to Damien. The guy is a beast and several times he's seen seams and stayed up for extra yardage.
Stop the reverses. The Niners defense is too smart and fast for those. Again, matriculate the ball downfield straight upfield.
Use that to keep the Niners D-backs in their heels. They can be exploited. Please please please just let Mahomes step back and fire the ball down the field to his receivers. Also always have a receiver go underneath the coverage -- too often Andy sends everyone up field and all Mahomes has is dump-offs to his backs and that's been ineffective like crazy so far.
Just let Patrick and his exceptional receiving core do their job.
On defense we started the game too nervous about their downfield passing game. Please. We were way too soft up front. Good thing after a while they got more aggressive at the line and that helped a lot slow the Niners offense.
For as good as Daniel Sorensen has been, the Niners have totally exploited his weaknesses. This is why on defense it'll be tricky for us to rely totally on our D-backfield.
This is why our offense is our best defense. We're able to have nice long drives, and we can always get the big play to keep us right in it. I like that Andy was aggressive and made first downs on two different 4th-&-shorts.
Yet this is also why this one could come down to the last minute with whoever has the ball in a close one. The Chiefs can explode here, but will Andy's adjustments best Kyle's adjustments?
One more half of Chiefs Super Bowl excitement this go-round!
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