Chiefs As World Champions - Part II

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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