Here’s the path the Chiefs’ Clark Hunt took to reach the best week of his public life
Clark Hunt has lived one of modern America’s charmed lives, a third-generation billionaire blessed with smarts and athleticism and eventually an NFL team. And even by that standard this is the week of his life, the family business pushed to the top of American sports and relevance.
The Chiefs — the team that his father founded and that he now serves as chairman — are in their first Super Bowl in 50 years. It’s been so long that Hunt, 54, does not remember it, as stark an example as is possible about the launching of a new era — Lin Elliott jokes replaced by Patrick Mahomes highlights.
So with that context here comes a column about Hunt and it is going to disappoint a lot of you who want and have pushed either of two extremes.
The narrative in parts of the Chiefs fan base has been that he is aloof, not around enough, not as invested emotionally or financially in the success of the franchise as his father. That’s hogwash.
The narrative in parts of the Chiefs organization has been that Hunt is the heartbeat of the organization, and that the team would not be where it is without his specific leadership. Also hogwash.
The truth about Hunt has always been in the murky middle. He is steady and organized and also hard to read, even for those who work for him.
He was never the reason the Chiefs failed to make the Super Bowl, and he’s not the reason they’re here now.
His greatest weakness from the first six years of his official chairmanship has turned into his greatest strength since, and it is a reflection of both his personality and leadership style — he hires the best football people he can find, and then lets them work.
“How about stay out of the way?” Hunt said when asked how he would define his job.
Let us be clear: he was joking. Mostly. There’s a lot more to it than that, but it does speak to how Hunt’s approach can be hard to process. He does not carry the ego feeding celebrity of Jerry Jones in Dallas, the rudderless hope vacuum of Dan Snyder in Washington, or the stubbornly lost path of Jimmy Haslam in Cleveland.
So, that’s a plus.
But Hunt’s strengths are hard to describe, too. He is not spoken of the way Pat Bowlen was in Denver, or the Rooneys are in Pittsburgh, or the Giants’ John Mara in New York. Hunt is widely respected in league circles, and has played important roles in the current CBA and the NFL’s growth internationally.
But in Kansas City, the impact always feels a little more vague.
“I think my job is to get everybody to work together,” he said. “That’s not only on the football side, but also on the business side and making sure the football and business side work well together.”
You can unpack that a bit, if you want. Most Chiefs fans do not think about or care much about the business side. That’s understandable. Spreadsheets make for lousy highlight reels.
But Hunt’s charge is to care about business as much as football, and without his father’s charisma it can come across as cold. That misses the point, though, like criticizing your accountant for not asking how your kid’s birthday party went. The Chiefs’ business is literally Hunt’s business. He’s a businessman. It should be what he’s focused on. He hires football people for the rest.
The story of Hunt’s strengths and weaknesses can be seen in the macro view of the Chiefs under his leadership.
Strength: he saw that the organization needed to be modernized upon officially taking the chairmanship in 2006.
Weakness: he did not have the people skills or street smarts to see that the personalities and skill sets of Scott Pioli and Todd Haley were fundamentally incompatible in building a successful team.
Weakness: it took longer than it should have for Hunt to see that.
Strength: once he did, he acted decisively and bold. He did that in hiring the best coaching candidate in a cycle with nine vacancies — more than a quarter of the league — and in rearranging the organization’s power structure so that the coach and general manager would each report directly to him.
Strength: he read the room deftly in seeing that John Dorsey’s service as general manager was both necessary and expired, again acting boldly, replacing him with Brett Veach.
And, perhaps the biggest strength of all: Hunt has never meddled in football decisions, asking only to be updated on processes and plans, supporting them when possible.
Maybe the best way to think of it is with the two single most important decisions on the Chiefs’ path from being perennially good enough to not win in the playoffs to here, the betting favorite in the Super Bowl.
When the Chiefs traded up to select Mahomes in the 2017 draft, they did so with no direction from ownership other than to build the best team possible. The front office and coaching staff worked together, with then-co-director of player personnel Veach identifying Mahomes and urging Andy Reid to watch film, eventually a consensus building to make the trade executed by Dorsey. Hunt was updated every step.
And when the Chiefs remade their defense last offseason, it was with Reid exercising autonomy on his assistants, firing his friend Bob Sutton, replacing him with Steve Spagnuolo and an entirely new staff. Veach executed the personnel side in concert with both Reid and Spagnuolo, particularly when the group concluded together that Tyrann Mathieu’s talents and personality would be a perfect fit.
“If you wanted to highlight one thing this year it would be the turnaround on defense,” Hunt said. “When (Veach) came to me and said, ‘You know, here are the 10 things we’re going to do to try to improve ourselves from a personnel standpoint on defense’ I was like, ‘Wow, that is a lot of change.’ And then getting that right, getting those players to fit together, getting them to work in the scheme with the new coaching staff, that was a heavy lift.”
You see it all in those words, right?
Hunt is involved — he’s told exactly what the coaches and front office are thinking, and asked for feedback.
Hunt is disinterested in credit — his words are about those coaches and executives and players.
Hunt is not the one making football decisions — he hired Veach and Reid for a reason, so he’s going to trust them.
That was the way Hunt operated when it didn’t work, and it’s the way he operates now, when it’s working better than any point since literally before he can remember. Hunt was not the one keeping the Chiefs back, and he’s not the one now pushing them to the Super Bowl.
But he is a part of it, and perhaps this is his greatest strength of all — he’s satisfied being a part, knowing that it takes everyone else, too.