Clark Hunt is very careful. This is one thing we have come to know about him. He is careful with his words, and he is conservative by nature, and he sounds patient all the time, and he likes to say positive things. What do we really know about him? He does not seem the type of guy who would throw a beer can at the television set, but it&#8217;s hard to tell. He does not seem the type of guy who would scream at an official who blows a call, but nobody knows for sure.</p><p>Truth is, I&#8217;m not sure that before Monday Clark Hunt had given us any sense at all of what&#8217;s going on in his mind. Hot dog or hamburger? Ginger or Mary Ann? Gates or Bryant&#8217;s? Pearl Jam or Nirvana? I don&#8217;t think any of us could really tell.</p><p>Monday, though, some of that changed. Monday, Clark Hunt announced that Carl Peterson had resigned as president, general manager and CEO of the Kansas City Chiefs. Yes, that&#8217;s what the honking horns and fireworks were all about. Yes, that&#8217;s why you saw complete strangers kissing on every street corner.</p><p>It&#8217;s a shame that it ends this way for Peterson, who will finish off his era in two weeks, closing out 20 years. As you might imagine, I was designated as the person to say something nice about Carl, and I will point to the first nine years. They were pretty great. The Chiefs went to the playoffs seven times, and they reached the AFC championship game once, and fans poured into Arrowhead Stadium. Carl changed the landscape of this city. He hired Marty Schottenheimer as coach, he opened up the parking lot for the best tailgate scene in professional sports, he got Joe Montana and Marcus Allen, and he drafted Derrick Thomas and Will Shields and Tony Gonzalez. And that&#8217;s a lot of good.</p><p>Of course, the last 11 years have not been so good &#8212; two playoff appearances, six losing seasons, four head coaches, perpetually awful defenses, zero playoff victories, shaky drafts &#8212; and that&#8217;s why in many ways Monday was not really about Carl Peterson. His time was running out. No, Monday was about Clark Hunt.</p><p>Monday, Hunt showed the sort of passion that, frankly, we did not know he had &#8212; could not know he had. When we last heard from Hunt, he was telling us that Peterson and Chiefs coach Herm Edwards were doing a good job and that he could see many promising signs. Those were probably the right things for an owner to say, the politically correct things, but they didn&#8217;t sound too good to fans looking for change and hope.</p><p>Hunt had said before that he&#8217;s extremely competitive, and he hates to lose, and he is probably not quite as patient as his Joblike father Lamar &#8212; but frankly, those just sounded like empty words when he talked about how things were going well while the Chiefs played dreadful football.</p><p>Sunday, though, something changed. There was a different look on Clark Hunt&#8217;s face after the Chiefs blew the game against San Diego in the final minutes. Several people mentioned it: &#8220;Man, Clark looked <em>mad</em>, didn&#8217;t he?&#8221; It was pretty unmistakable.</p><p>Of course, Hunt made it plain that Sunday&#8217;s loss had nothing at all to do with Monday&#8217;s resignation &#8212; Hunt said that he had been talking with Peterson about resigning for a while now &#8212; and I&#8217;m sure that&#8217;s technically true. But something definitely changed. Hunt spoke as carefully as ever on Monday, but behind his cautious words, you could hear a little bit of emotion and get a little bit better sense of the man who owns the Chiefs: