Like ‘a mountain lion tasting blood,’ 2019 Chiefs are on same trajectory as ’15 Royals
During the Big Slick Celebrity Weekend in June, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Dustin Colquitt of the Chiefs popped in to the Royals’ clubhouse to chat with their baseball peers. As they made their way around the room, they were told then-manager Ned Yost wanted to say hello in his office.
With the trio plopped on the couch, Yost leaned back in his desk chair and delivered an impassioned and personalized message. Predicated on what he considered a meaningful shared experience of falling tantalizingly close to what might have been, Yost wanted to share his conviction and experience about what might yet come of it.
Just as the Royals had converted their bitter 2014 downfall in Game 7 of the World Series into the 2015 jackpot, he wanted them to know, all was aligned for the Chiefs to parlay their painful 2018 ending with a Super Bowl berth in their grasp into the ultimate victory this season.
“‘This is the year; this is kind of how we felt going in, coming up 90 feet short,’” Colquitt recalled Yost saying. “‘What you guys have now, what you guys are building on, I can feel it. Everybody can feel it.’”
Enough so that Colquitt remembered Kelce sitting up and saying, “‘Oh, my gosh, Ned, I want to go right now!’”
For that matter, Yost could still feel it. He was nearly as animated on the phone Wednesday when it came to that topic.
“They got all fired up, and I was fired up because I could feel the connection and see exactly how they were coming along like we were,” Yost, who retired after last season, said from his farm in Georgia.
Even acknowledging the different dynamics of the sports, he firmly believes that “it’s all the same” when a team has gotten to the point “where you can smell and taste and see a championship developing.”
“The experience gained is invaluable,” he said. “And now that they’ve been there, they understand what it’s like. And once you get a little taste of it, it’s like a mountain lion with blood: Once you get a little taste, nothing’s going to stop you.”
Across the parking lot
If every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end, like it says in Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” the parallels that now include starting the postseason against Houston are rooted in this:
With Kansas City transfixed after decades of futility from its most prominent sports teams, the moments of truth became that of men in limbo preciously close to another ending.
Here stood Royals outfielder Alex Gordon, given a prudent but unsatisfying stop sign 90 feet from home plate at Kauffman Stadium. That came with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 2014 World Series, and the Royals trailing the Giants 3-2.
Twenty-nine years after their last postseason appearance, an enchanted breakout season was punctuated by the enduring snapshot of Gordon stranded there.
Five years later, across the parking lot at Arrowhead Stadium, here trespassed Chiefs linebacker Dee Ford, offsides with his right hand in the grass to negate Charvarius Ward’s interception of New England quarterback Tom Brady that could have sealed a victory for the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game.
Instead, it became a 37-31 overtime loss further determined by random chance: the coin toss that gave the Patriots the ball against a vulnerable defense — and the nonsensical NFL rule that left the Chiefs without an opportunity to counter.
Twenty-five years after their last conference title game appearance, the mesmerizing first season of the Mahomes Era was punctuated by the only defense able to stop him, his own, encapsulated in the indelible still-life of Ford frozen offsides.
Urgency and harmony
For the Royals, of course, that anguished ending proved to be the precursor of their triumph in the 2015 World Series.
What last season’s brush with greatness does now for the Chiefs is an open question, much like whatever similarities they bear to the 1969 team that last went to the Super Bowl.
But the circumstances bear some fascinating and perhaps revealing points of comparison between the franchises that enjoy strong relationships, reflected in Yost calling Mahomes “my quarterback” and Reid “my coach.”
From the top-down organizational urgency to seize the moment to the crucial experience it injected into a young team, from the evident commitment to the obvious harmonic chemistry in the group, from key personnel changes to a certain swagger to clinching their divisions early, the bearings and trajectories of the franchises in the aftermath of the heartbreak thus far have run on analogous paths.
“I just feel a sense of hunger (in this Chiefs team),” Royals general manager Dayton Moore said.
While careful to clarify he sees this through the prism of a fan, Moore also perceives a selfless group dynamic. That to him suggests a team that cares foremost about winning and playing for each other and isn’t motivated by individual attention or credit — intangibles he and others in the Royals organization considered imperative to their special 2015 season.
As it was with the Royals, that’s no accident. Chiefs general manager Brett Veach and coach Andy Reid are acutely culture-conscious, embodied in what safety Tyrann Mathieu brings to the team: not merely All-Pro caliber play but a notion that being a great teammate might be more important than being a great player.
That reflects one of Moore’s prime directives to everyone in the organization, something he derived from the words of legendary basketball coach John Wooden:
“A player who makes a team great is more valuable than a great player.”
Growing through adversity
Yost would later imagine the 2014 feeling to be like making one’s grueling way steps from summitting Mt. Everest … only to be kicked all the way back down and having to start over.
But the truth is the narrow defeat was a head start, a catalyst that engaged action not long after fans at Kauffman provided an unforgettable curtain call with their “Let’s Go, Royals” chant.
First, it was important to absorb what had happened, not dismiss it. Just as the Chiefs endorsed the pain of their loss to the Patriots.
While there is little evidence of the Chiefs in mourning such as that shared by the Royals, such as Jarrod Dyson saying he could hardly get out of bed, the Chiefs conveyed similar words in their aftermath.
At the postgame news conference that night, Reid said feeling the pain was how you get better.
“Let it drive you through the offseason,” he said. “And have this feeling, that hurt, and let that carry you through so that you don’t experience it again.”
That sensation was contagious in both cases, too.
At a consolation rally the day after the Royals’ Game 7 loss, Moore remembers then-owner David Glass being not appeased, but upset. “I want that trophy with all the flags on it,” Royals vice president Mike Swanson recalled Glass saying.
Toward that end, with Glass “allowing us to do what we needed to do,” Moore said immediately after that rally the staff convened in a conference room and began to identify how to go that extra step.
“All we wanted to do was work,” said Moore, who soon would sign Kendrys Morales and Edinson Volquez and started targeting Johnny Cueto for what became a key midseason deal along with the acquisition of Ben Zobrist.
The sentiment was the same after last season at the Chiefs’ nearby training complex, with owner Clark Hunt surely no less disappointed not to get the trophy he wanted — the one bearing his father’s name, that goes to the AFC champion.
Two days after their loss to the Patriots, the Chiefs announced the firing of defensive coordinator Bob Sutton, the first of a flurry of moves on that side of the ball that led to a staff makeover spearheaded by new defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, a new scheme and a lineup shuffle highlighted by the signings of Mathieu and defensive end Frank Clark.
Like the Royals, who went from what Mike Moustakas had called “unfinished business” to what Moore called “all-in,” the Chiefs had shoved their chips into the middle of the table.
Led then by a 61-year-old California-born manager. Led now by a 61-year-old California-born coach.
Each with a different sort of edge and experience among a field of teams that hasn’t advanced this far before. That showed up for the Royals in both desire and poise in the 2015 postseason.
In the playoffs, inexperienced players tend to do things “a little too fast, a little out of control,” Moore said. While others blinked, there was little of that among the Royals in 2015, including in ways subtle and eye-popping.
In clinching Game 5 of the World Series, for instance, Lorenzo Cain started a ninth-inning rally by taking a walk — suppressing what Moore called “a propensity to chase the breaking ball down and away.”
Then there was Eric Hosmer’s apparent mad dash to tie it on a play that reflected not recklessness but scouting.
It’s a dynamic that you might just see Sunday out of Mahomes, who has a remarkable knack for controlled ad-libbing — and now has had a taste of this lodged in his craw since watching the Super Bowl last year and thinking that was where the Chiefs belonged.
A year later, it’s their chance to keep that feeling from being in vain — and to make good on the parallels observed by Yost in particular.
“We were that close, they were that close,” Colquitt said. “It just kind of resonated.”
With a chance to resonate plenty more in the weeks to come.