Here, to me, is the hardest part of rooting for a very bad team: Nothing seems good. Nothing. Every move looks awful. Every decision seems misguided. Every step feels like a misstep. It&rsquo;s hard to see <em>any</em> water in the glass &mdash; forget about it being half full.</p><p> The Chiefs have reached that level of bad now. You already know that they have lost 26 of 28 games &mdash; no team in football, not even the legendary Detroit Lions, has been as bad over that stretch of time. They are 0-3 already this year, of course, and this includes a home loss to the JaMarcus Russell-infused Oakland Raiders and a game in Philadelphia where the Chiefs openly gave up at halftime. </p><p> And honestly &mdash; it&rsquo;s hard to see anything good anywhere. The face of the franchise, Tony Gonzalez, was traded in the offseason. The classy spokesman of the team through the rough years, Brian Waters, seems to feel alienated and generally ticked off. Lots of players do.</p><p>The Chiefs spent a boatload of money on lifelong backup quarterback Matt Cassel, and Todd Haley &mdash; somewhere between his many jobs as head coach, offensive coordinator, player alienator and amusing sideline ranter &mdash; seems unsure about Cassel&rsquo;s talents. </p><p>The offensive line is a disaster, the just-off-the-waiver-wire receiving corps scares no one, Larry Johnson looks broken down, the defense&rsquo;s front seven can&rsquo;t get to the quarterback, there have been penalties and astonishingly bad game decisions, and nobody seems entirely sure what new GM Scott Pioli is thinking inside the Chieftagon. </p><p> I suspect this is how many people (most people?) see the Kansas City Chiefs these days. Hopeless. But is it really as bad as all that? The truth is: When things are this bad, it is hard to get a clear look at what&rsquo;s really happening. This team has played so bad the last two years that only the truest of the true believers could see through the fog and find something good to say.</p><p> So I found the truest of the true believers: His name is Michael MacCambridge. You should know Michael&rsquo;s name because he&rsquo;s probably the nation&rsquo;s leading expert on NFL history. His book &ldquo;America&rsquo;s Game&rdquo; is the most complete book on pro football ever written. And his new book with Brian Billick, &ldquo;More Than a Game,&rdquo; provides a fascinating look inside the NFL bubble.</p><p> More than all of that, though, Michael is probably the world&rsquo;s most positive Chiefs fan. He has endured what all Chiefs fans have endured, of course &mdash; the thrilling football of Otis Taylor and Willie Lanier and Bobby Bell of the Super Bowl Chiefs, the horrors of the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the hope brought in by Carl Peterson and Marty Schottenheimer, all the near-misses of the 1990s, the wild and crazy Dick Vermeil years, the joylessness of the Herm Edwards era. None of it can break his spirit.</p><p> Put it this way: After the Chiefs lost to the Raiders at home, Michael sent this text: &ldquo;Exasperating game, but plenty to be encouraged about as well.&rdquo;</p><p> Huh? What could be encouraging about losing to Oakland at home in a game splattered with penalties and bungles and so on? Then last week, when the Chiefs went into that infuriating Woody Hayes offense when down three touchdowns, again Michael wrote that while it was hard to watch, he saw some good things. What could he have seen?</p><p> So I asked him. And here&rsquo;s what the Chiefs look like from the sunny side of the street:</p><p> &ldquo;I understand the impatience,&rdquo; Michael writes. &ldquo;The fans of this team got so close so many times, and we came to take the perennial contender status for granted. &hellip;