Survival is the name of the game for Chiefs

ATLANTA | There’s an art form to asking very large, sweaty and angry men why they stink at the game of football. You want to be sensitive. You want to be diplomatic. You want to be sympathetic. You want to ask the question in a way that won’t get you folded into uncomfortable-looking origami shapes.

So, in the locker room after the Chiefs’ 12th consecutive loss — a 38-14 humiliation to Atlanta in front of 14 or 15 people in the Georgia Dome — you heard lots of very odd-sounding questions like, “Did you feel like this was a step forward?” And, “Could you see any progress being made?” And, “Was there anything you can take from this to build on?”

These are known as “survival questions.” No, of course there was nothing good to come out of Sunday’s game. Nothing. The Chiefs made Atlanta’s rookie quarterback Matt Ryan look like Roger Staubach. The Chiefs’ defense — supposedly the strength of the team — missed about 23 tackles, and that was on just one Michael Turner run. The Chiefs punted four times in the first quarter, and that was only because they ran out of time. The fifth punt came 1 minute, 17 seconds into the second quarter.

No, there was nothing good to come out of Sunday’s game. Except this: Everybody made it out of Atlanta alive.

And really, at this point, all anyone wants is to survive this season. Let’s just try to get through this thing without anybody getting hurt. The Chiefs are as bad a football team as I have ever been around, and I was around some doozies in Cincinnati back in the mid-1990s. Those Bengals teams weren’t just bad, they were comedy. I remember a Bengals player fair-catching a punt at the 1 once.

Then again, on Sunday, Kansas City’s B.J. Sams fair-caught a punt at the 7 twice. In the fourth quarter.

I remember the Bengals once taking back-to-back delay-of-game penalties. That seemed about as low as a team could go.

Then again, on Sunday, Kansas City’s Tyler Thigpen began the game by completing one of his first 11 passes for minus-1 yard with an interception mixed in. He completed his first pass for positive yards about 7 minutes into the second quarter. He celebrated the achievement by throwing another interception on his next pass.

I remember what it was like after all those Bengals losses. Every week, it was the same dreadful scene. The Bengals would lose horribly. Then the football coach, Dave Shula, would try to spin a couple of positives in his news conference. Hey, the players didn’t give up. Hey, there was that one good drive in the third quarter. And so on.

Then, in the locker room, reporters would try to find delicate ways to broach the subject of the team’s collaborative awfulness, and players would try to find new ways to say that everybody had to stay positive and stay together. It was like “Gilligan’s Island.” The plot changed slightly each time out, but the overriding story, as always, was that nobody was ever getting off the island.

That was the scene Sunday. Apparently, it’s like this for every bad team. First, the Chiefs lost horribly. The Chiefs’ defense could not come close to stopping a Falcons team that finished 29th in the NFL in scoring last year; the Chiefs’ offense was hopeless until the game was out of reach; kicker Nick Novak missed a 32-yard field goal in a dome; the Chiefs decided to run a sweep on fourth and goal from the 2 (failed); and so on. There were a couple of blown timeouts in there, too. Bad football, all around.

Then, the game ended and Chiefs coach Herm Edwards, who usually can be counted on to at least offer up a couple of memorable lines, mumbled a monotone spiel about how everyone has to play better and how the Chiefs didn’t quit.

To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.

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