Priest Holmes, you probably know, was an odd guy when he was the running back for the Chiefs. </p><p>His teammates did not understand him at all. He liked to be left alone. He liked to play games like chess and Scrabble in his spare time. He was proudly cheap; he would go to extreme lengths to save a dollar here or there. He would change his cell number every three weeks. He would walk off in the middle of conversations &mdash; not maliciously, but just because &hellip; well &hellip; just because that was Priest Holmes.</p><p> But here&rsquo;s the thing: Unlike his successor, Larry Johnson, everyone admired Holmes. Every teammate. They could not help but admire him. Holmes was small, and he wasn&rsquo;t all that fast, and he had to endure an endless series of injuries. But he made himself into a great football player. He worked harder, prepared more, played through pain, almost never fumbled, picked up blitzes, came back from injuries. They all remember Saturdays, when he would stay on the field for an extra 45 minutes or hour and just walk through every play, visualize what was possible.</p><p> Priest Holmes was the sort of player teammates felt proud to play with, a player who could make people around say: &ldquo;See that guy? THAT is what the Kansas City Chiefs are all about.&rdquo;</p><p> Now, I don&rsquo;t mean to exaggerate his presences. The Chiefs did not win a Super Bowl or even a playoff game with Priest Holmes. But they might have won both with even a decent defense. And, anyway, they won games. They gave an honest effort. They scored a lot of points. They were a good team. They made Sundays in Kansas City fun.</p><p> Monday, as you know, the Chiefs released Johnson &mdash; with him just 74 yards shy of Holmes&rsquo; team rushing record. You know, there were times when Johnson looked to be an even better runner than Holmes. Johnson IS big, and he IS fast, and when he ran hard he inspired images of Jim Brown, even in some of Brown&rsquo;s former teammates. He ran for 1,750 yards and scored 20 touchdowns despite starting only nine games in 2005, and in 2006 he carried the ball an NFL record 416 times. His teammates appreciated his talents and his intensity, and they probably understood him better than they did Priest Holmes.</p><p> But, best I could tell, they did not admire him. They did not respect him. They did not take pride in having him as a teammate. How could they? And I don&rsquo;t just say this because of the off-the-field stuff &mdash; the arrests, the drama, the Twitter rampage. </p><p> No, more, they didn&rsquo;t respect the kind of football player Larry Johnson was. He could not catch. He did not block. His effort seemed intermittent. He griped constantly. You think there was a single guy on this team who pointed at Larry Johnson and proudly said: &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what the Chiefs are about&rdquo;?</p><p> No. And yet he is exactly what the Chiefs have been about. For five years, with Priest Holmes, the Chiefs were built around an overachiever who once chased a defensive back for 100 yards after an interception in the desperate (and futile) hope that he could catch him. The last five years, with Larry Johnson, the Chiefs were built around a one-dimensional back who had to be taken out on third down and who made more headlines for getting suspended than scoring touchdowns. </p><p> It wasn&rsquo;t entirely or even mostly Johnson&rsquo;s fault the Chiefs got worse every one of those five years &mdash; the team really collapsed around him. But when a team&rsquo;s marquee player is a gigantic pain in the neck on and off the field, well, those teams tend to be losers. There aren&rsquo;t many exceptions to that rule.