If the Chiefs keep winning, could Kansas City fans become the new Patriots fans?
This column is about a long-tortured football franchise that had taught its fans to expect the worse before a combination of luck and courage paired one of the game’s greatest quarterbacks and coaches and started winning championships.
More specifically, this column is about the fans of that franchise — loyal (sometimes to a fault), proud (even when their team didn’t give them much reason to be) and more than a little obsessed with where they’re from and sensitive to slights both real and perceived.
This column is about, of course, the New England Patriots.
OK, this column is also about the Kansas City Chiefs.
But only in this way: Sre Chiefs fans, perhaps on the brink of watching their team establish the NFL’s next dynasty, destined to soon be thought of like Patriots fans?
And the last thing you need is clarification about how Patriots fans are thought of, but here goes anyway: entitled, arrogant, on the wrong side of the knowledge-confidence ratio, with obnoxious victim complexes and imminently punchable faces.
“One of the very instrumental assets of Patriots fans is to take any perceived slight, no matter how reasonable and construe it as disrespect and use that as motivation,” said Christian D’Andrea, a football writer who began cheering for the Patriots in the seven-year playoff drought between Tony Eason and Drew Bledsoe.
“The currency there was this kind of friendship, these bonds that you built became more insular and a little less fun to be around. Like if you were talking about football with someone else, they would immediately get sick because your takes would be so Patriots-centric that it was just tough to see how far up your own ass your head had gotten.”
Tom Curran, a lifelong New Englander who’s covered the Patriots for decades, adds some historical context. People in that part of the country tend to have an unusual pride. They’re where the pilgrims landed, and home to the country’s best universities and hospitals.
New York pulled ahead of Boston and the surrounding area, which put a metaphorical chip on New Englanders’ collective shoulders. With the notable exception of the Celtics, the sports there often stunk — the Patriots had never won a Super Bowl before Brady, the Red Sox ended an 86-year drought in 2004, and the Bruins a 39-year slump in 2011.
In Curran’s telling, once the success came fans “lorded it over everyone.” Then came Spygate and Deflategate, which allowed them to feel persecuted and de-legitimized again.
Add to the mix a deep infiltration of media — Bill Simmons, Dave Portnoy and a million Matt Damon-Ben Affleck movies — and it felt to the rest of us like they’d never shut up.
So, we began to hate them. And if we’re honest, they deserved every ounce of it, the smug, dismissive, spoiled punks.
“We are also good at the internet,” Curran wrote in a text message. “So we could (mess) with everyone there.”
So, at the risk of putting the cart of fan baggage ahead of the horse of team success, is this how Chiefs fans are going to be?
Maybe we’re about to find out. We can see small examples already in media coverage and on social media. The world moves faster than ever, and at times it can feel like the Chiefs skipped a step on the progression from punchline to potential dynasty.
The Chiefs are in some ways the NFL’s answer to the 2015 Warriors, who eventually became the NBA’s villains but only after winning 73 games and signing Kevin Durant. If the Chiefs lose the Super Bowl and then somehow sign Chris Godwin and trade for Deshaun Watson to backup Mahomes, then fine. Villains.
But watching casual fans and at least some national media rush to pick apart a team that just won its first Super Bowl in a half century is some type of whiplash.
Was there blowback like this before the Bulls won a second championship? The Cowboys? The Patriots needed Bill Belichick ripping his sleeves with scissors and spying on a Super Bowl opponent. The Chiefs, apparently, just needed a lot of people gushing over Mahomes?
Steven A. Smith, who has built himself an empire by creating strange debates, recently came surprisingly close to calling Mahomes a system quarterback. An ESPN analyst gave the Bills the advantage at quarterback in the AFC Championship Game.
Virtually any clip of another team’s quarterback making a nice throw is followed by some form of a if-Mahomes-did-this-they’d-demand-the-clip-go-straight-to-the-Smithsonian reply. The Chiefs have replaced the Patriots as the team frustrated fan bases think gets all the officiating breaks based on some secret commissioner’s decree.
Just a year ago, they were America’s team, but if the star quarterback is finding slights while being the league’s most successful and respected player, then is it only a matter of time before fans do the same?
The forces — the winning, the fun, the flyover insecurity — make a potentially toxic mix. It’s true that you can probably find anything you’re looking for on social media, but friends we have a Chiefs fan clowning the Bucs for taking some other team’s old quarterback.
And this slam was in response to — *checks notes* — a trash-talking airport?
We’ll go one more time to D’Andrea, for some advice on how Chiefs fans can keep touch with the natural Midwestern tendency to want to be liked.
“I think we’ll get sick of the Chiefs the same way we kind of got sick of the Warriors after they started winning,” he said. “Kansas City’s obviously got a lot of things going for it, but unlike Boston fans or Philly fans, the first thing you think of isn’t, ‘Oh, these guys are (jerks).’ It’s, ‘Oh, they tailgate all the time and are really loud at Arrowhead.’ So you have that going for you, plus (the players are) very likable.”
Sounds pretty simple. Don’t allow yourself to feel like a victim. Understand that your team is not perfect, and will not play perfectly, and is not entitled to every Super Bowl from now until Mahomes buys the team.
The plain truth is that Chiefs fans will be operating from an advantage here. It is unlikely that Kansas City will land an NBA and NHL team, and that they and the Royals will join the Chiefs as regular parade participants, and that Reid will start cutting his sleeves and spying on opponents and that American pop culture will suddenly be taken over by a bunch of obnoxious fanboys who will convince themselves they deserve every championship from now until Clark Hunt’s children’s children are running the team.
That seems like an impossible string of events.
Then again, Mahomes is in year three of giving us the impossible.