A Super Bowl winner hasn’t repeated in 15 years. Here’s why the Chiefs can be different
Well, this is something.
The Chiefs won the dang Super Bowl, changing a franchise’s sorry postseason history and officially opening a championship era for the game’s best quarterback, and they did all this with something like a B+ effort?
OK, fine. We’re exaggerating for effect. But here’s what Chiefs coach Andy Reid had to say about this on Friday:
“I don’t think we came near to what we could be last year.”
That’s a hell of a thing to say. NFL coaches are obsessive and self-critical by nature, sure, but still. That line will echo, said and unsaid, in every team meeting and every practice and every game between now and the next postseason.
Reid is the rare coach with the juice to pull this off, too. A coach saying a Super Bowl championship isn’t good enough can be met with eye-rolls, but Reid’s egoless and collaborative approach positions well him to enforce the message.
“I think a lot of times when you win that Super Bowl you relax because you feel like you’ve done it,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said. “You’ve accomplished your goal. With our team the little bit of difference I feel like we have is it’s, like, every single guy, once we won the Super Bowl, well, we definitely celebrated for a week or two, and then after that it was that mindset of, ‘We’re going to get back after it. We want this again.’”
Let us be clear: Super Bowl winners almost never win again the next year. It hasn’t happened since the New England Patriots beat Reid’s Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl after the 2004 season. Mahomes was in third grade at the time.
The reasons why are about more than just the NFL’s signature parity. This goes deeper than the salary cap or first-place schedules. This is not an example of the league’s mechanics.
This is the sport’s reality.
Think back over the last few years, and how often Chiefs players and coaches have expressed being driven by the prospect of beating the Patriots, or finally winning the trophy with the club founder’s name on it, or securing a Super Bowl championship for themselves and their coach.
This is just one example, but it sticks out from last year: I asked safety Tyrann Mathieu if he spent more time watching Patriots film than other teams’, and whether that study included weeks when they faced other opponents.
“Yeah, naturally,” he said. “If you see yourself as a playoff team, you always picture yourself playing against the Patriots.”
Well, the Chiefs are now the Patriots. The Patriots are now the Chiefs. The script is flipped.
Almost every year, the Super Bowl champions are either the favorite or among the top favorites to win again. Yet they are zero for their last 15 as a group, with just one success this century.
All of the forces working against every returning champion are now working against the Chiefs.
All of that is true, and the Chiefs are still the deserved favorite with a real chance to reverse 15 years of NFL history.
First, they have some basic mechanical factors working for them. Assuming that star defensive lineman Chris Jones gets the extension he’s earned or plays the upcoming season on the club’s franchise tag, the realities of the league’s salary cap will not have hit the Chiefs the way they have other champions.
Twenty of 22 Super Bowl starters return to the Chiefs’ roster this fall, and the team drafted at least two day one-quality starters.
This isn’t continuity in the name of sentiment, either. The roster is young. Look at the ages of the Chiefs’ best players: Mahomes is 24, Mathieu 27, Jones 25 and Tyreek Hill and Frank Clark are 26.
Travis Kelce and Mitchell Schwartz are each 30, the Chiefs’ only stars outside their 20s, and each appears to be comfortably in his prime. Kelce’s two most productive seasons are his last two, and Schwartz has been named first- or second-team All-Pro five years in a row at a position that tends to age well.
Simply put, there is not a team in the league that wouldn’t trade rosters with the Chiefs, and that might be true even if you took quarterbacks out of the equation.
The Baltimore Ravens appear to be the Chiefs’ biggest competition in the AFC and, in fact, are the league’s No. 2 betting favorite. Their roster is similarly well-positioned with youth, but it’s also true that questions exist about how well MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson can hold up long-term. The Chiefs beat the Ravens in each of the last two years and Baltimore hasn’t won a playoff game since the 2014 season.
But at least for a moment, let’s focus on the harder to quantify. It’s not a coincidence that when asked about the difficulties of repeating that football men, including Reid and Mahomes, talk first and most deeply of motivation.
Reid, who was an assistant when the Green Bay Packers lost Super Bowl XXXII after winning the previous year, mentioned “a certain climb-the-ladder attitude” that teams use to get to the top.
“The second time you go, some of those motivations you don’t have,” he said. “It’s not the same motivation you had the first time.”
So, lets talk about motivation. It’ll be different, sure. Has to be. These are humans, not machines. If you’re married, you probably remember the first date with your spouse better than the second.
But the Chiefs have already faced and passed smaller tests along the way. Their build to this point has been done without shortcuts, or flukes. In Reid’s seven seasons here, only the Patriots have won more games or made more postseasons.
They have won the AFC West four years in a row and, yes, beating Joe Flacco’s Denver Broncos or (the old version of) Philip Rivers’ Chargers is a far lesser challenge than stopping Jackson’s Ravens.
But if we’re talking about motivations, and repeatable successes, only the Patriots’ dynasty that no longer exists has more steadily owned a division in recent years.
A plain truth exists, too, and this might be a little uncomfortable for Chiefs fans quarantined with all their Super Bowl championship gear:
The roster is too good, Reid is too good, and Mahomes is far too good for anyone involved to honestly view one championship as a resounding success.
The best example might be the Packers and Aaron Rodgers. They won in 2010, when Rodgers was 27. They have not been back, and much of the last few years in Green Bay has been spent in a blame-game about this lack of recent championships. The Packers just drafted Rodgers’ presumptive eventual replacement at quarterback.
The Chiefs aren’t stupid, or delusional. They see that and understand the same fate would await them if this is as good as it gets.
In this way, Reid is right on a few levels: The Chiefs did not accomplish their greatest goals or become their best selves last year. There’s more work to be done. More titles to be won.
“It’s a mindset and it starts, like, now,” he said. “Even though we’re doing this thing virtually, it starts now. There’s no time to waste. We’re not going to just go, ‘OK, we’ve got everybody coming back and we’re going to give you the same plays to run.’ No, we’re going to keep growing.”
Here’s one factor out of the Chiefs’ control: luck.
The franchise has often been defined by bad luck over the years, but that changed in 2019. They endured a run of injuries, but by the playoffs they had everyone healthy except rookie safety Juan Thornhill, Alex Okafor and Emmanuel Ogbah. Most notably, a knee injury that initially appeared gruesome ended up keeping Mahomes out for just two games.
A loss to the Tennessee Titans pushed the Chiefs in front of the Ravens and other teams on the waiver wire, allowing them to add potential Hall of Famer Terrell Suggs to their defensive line, an area of need. They still ended up with a first-round bye after the Miami Dolphins (!) beat the Patriots, and still wound up hosting the AFC Championship Game when the Titans won at Baltimore.
The Chiefs went from needing to expect to win three road games to reach Super Bowl LIV to winning two at home.
Those kinds of things are completely out of the Chiefs’ control, and if their luck evens out after longer periods of time, then maybe the Chiefs are due a few bad breaks once the 2020 season begins.
But people in sports talk constantly about controlling what they can control and letting everything else go.
And the Chiefs are enviably positioned to control everything a football team can possibly control.
This story was originally published May 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.