The last great American dynasty
The Kansas City Chiefs were once the upstarts that ended the long era of New England dominance. But the Chiefs are becoming rather Pats-like
Wide receiver Tyreek Hill was recently voted, in a survey of his peers, the best player in the NFL.
The Kansas City Chiefs won two consecutive Super Bowls after they traded him away.
On Thursday night, in a rematch of the AFC Championship Game, the Chiefs survived a late comeback to beat the Baltimore Ravens, and had two touchdowns from a rookie wide receiver, Xavier Worthy, who shares some of Tyreek’s characteristics: small and fast. Real fast.
I think I speak for the rest of the NFL when I say: 😬.
It wasn’t that long ago that the Chiefs were a pleasing team to a neutral. They hadn’t won much for a very long time, and so no one really hated Kansas City. They brought in Andy Reid to coach, and his resumé was one of sustained regular-season success followed by embarrassing playoff failure. He also kind of looked like a walrus, which is neither here nor there.
Reid turned a 2-14 team into an 11-5 team in one season — he’s pretty good at the coaching — and went on a very Reid-like run of winning seasons and playoff ousters.
Then he gave the keys to Patrick Mahomes. The kid whose father was a major-league pitcher was a revelation, throwing the ball all over the place and from weird angles, with just enough scrambling ability to break the hearts of defences that managed to contain the other stuff. Arriving when he did to an AFC that had been ruled for pretty much two decades by the New England Patriots, Mahomes was, finally, something different. He and the Chiefs were unpredictable where the Patriots were methodical and relentless. The other nice thing about Kansas City, from a neutral’s perspective, is that they were not inevitable.
They lost to the Pats in a playoff game they should have won but for a late offside call. They won a Super Bowl against San Francisco in a game they could have easily lost, had Niners QB Jimmy Garoppolo not overthrown an open receiver in the dying minutes. They were blown out in a Super Bowl by Tampa Bay, and smoked in the playoffs the following year by Cincinnati.
Then they got rid of one of the most dangerous weapons in the league in Tyreek Hill and … got better.
It’s not that simple, of course. The defence has improved considerably, thanks at least in part to spending that otherwise would have gone to Hill, and at times over the past two seasons the offence has lacked the explosiveness of its Tyreek era, where any broken play had the potential for an 80-yard touchdown after Mahomes ran around for a while and just flung it in the direction of number 10.
But the Chiefs have done that thing that the Pats did over and over at the height of Belichick-and-Brady: they made just enough plays to win. Their playoff runs of the past two seasons have more close victories than blowouts, and they won both Super Bowls with late scores to end the game. And just like the Patriots would seem to be about to lose a big game right up until Brady lofted a ball in the direction of a double-covered Rob Gronkowski, who would somehow catch the damn thing while defensive backs hung off him like Christmas ornaments, Mahomes has his security blanket in Travis Kelce, who always manages to find open space in a moment of crisis. And whose every catch is followed by a shot of a celebrating Taylor Swift.
There are a host of reasons to doubt that the Chiefs will win a third straight Super Bowl, beginning with the fact that it hasn’t been done before. Even if they have continued health from their high-profile players, no team has the depth to survive a bad run of injuries among the usual starters. It doesn’t take much to derail a promising season, and history suggests it’s hard to keep avoiding that.
But, much like New England’s heyday, the Chiefs play in a soft division. There is Denver with a rookie quarterback, the Las Vegas Raiders led by Gardner Minshew and a Los Angeles Chargers team with a new coach in Jim Harbaugh and a lot of salary-cap mess to clean up. It’s hard to imagine the series of events that would lead to the Chiefs not winning yet another AFC West title.
Which gets them to the playoffs. They embarrassed the Miami Dolphins in the post-season last year, they keep managing to beat the Ravens, and the Buffalo Bills, sigh, can’t quite figure out how not to leave Mahomes enough time on the clock for a game-winning drive.
Are the Chiefs inevitable now? No. But I suspect Taylor Swift hasn’t made any plans for February 9.