For Chiefs, Super Bowl played out perfectly to cast light on darkness of last 50 years
Fifty years in the making, the game that changed everything for the Kansas City Chiefs needed to be this way, didn’t it?
It was the spine-tingling stuff Chiefs fans earned through their suffering, delivered with the sort of indelible moments that you’ll never forget.
The kind of insane drama that so often went the other way, with the sort of intensity that you could only fully feel if it went like this: a rousing fourth quarter comeback to beat the San Francisco 49ers 31-20 in Super Bowl LIV on Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium.
A blowout would have been welcome, sure. But this was the more pure and visceral method to purge years of cruel twists and turns that left a fanbase wondering if its turn ever would come again.
It was absolutely appropriate that the night set up as yet another trap-door falling open, beckoning another freefall.
Only this time the Chiefs demonstrated once and for all why that half-century status quo is no more, a skin shed.
Behind 20-10 in the fourth quarter, they made like escape artists yet again in a postseason that featured them trailing by double digits in every game before rallying.
Dire as it looked this time around, if you ever thought it was over you haven’t been paying attention to the phenomenon that is Patrick Mahomes — who made good on the impossible faith that he has inspired in Chiefs fans even on a night that required him to cling hard to it within himself after throwing two interceptions.
First, on third-and-15, he uncorked a 44-yard pass to Tyreek Hill, which set up a touchdown pass to Travis Kelce. Then, keyed by a three-and-out stop by the defense, his 38-yard pass to Sammy Watkins paved the way for the go-ahead TD pass to Damien Williams.
In the process, Mahomes delivered not just for Kansas City and for the Hunt family but for coach Andy Reid, the beloved offensive genius and sentimental favorite in this game who seemingly waited all his life for just the right quarterback to complete him.
“It puts all doubt aside,” Mahomes said after being chosen Super Bowl MVP, that Reid will be considered among the best coaches in the history of the game.
When it looked like the Super Bowl might elude Reid again, everything suddenly came into focus about why it didn’t — from the rise of Mahomes to the robust reaction to last season’s final game to the magic that is the Chiefs’ marriage to Reid, their 12th coach since the legendary Hank Stram.
Each set in motion all that would follow and helps explain how we finally got here from 1970.
They say the darkest hour is before the dawn.
Along with the virtually miraculous arrival of Mahomes, that’s the essence of how it unfolded for the Chiefs — who still couldn’t have done this without the bleakness of 2012 and the clarifying heartbreak of how last season ended.
A franchise fades
Since winning Super Bowl IV, the intervening 50 years for the Chiefs wasn’t just about a collage of horrendous seasons and preposterous playoff losses.
It was the context of all that: their precipitous plunge from their elite, influential early days, when they stood on the verge of being a dynasty. Under Stram, the winners of three AFL championships from the 1962 to 1969 seasons appeared in two of the first four Super Bowls and were among the most compelling teams in the country.
They were cool and smart and innovative, breaking down racial barriers to become the first team in pro football to win a championship with a majority of African-American starters and flashing then-extravagant offensive schemes and distinctive flourishes like the choir huddle.
By the time the Chiefs had won Super Bowl IV, they had played in two of the first four and were as present as a team could be nationally in those days.
But despite having an owner, coach, six defenders and eight players overall who would ultimately be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the Chiefs were aging out as others were coming of age and soon became anonymous afterthoughts as the Super Bowl grew.
Whatever snapshots of hope the franchise enjoyed in the last half-century, their absence from the Super Bowl became among the most pronounced in the game.
They stood in the vicinity of the Lions and the Browns — the only NFL teams never to play in a Super Bowl. They were fast in the company of the Jets, who played in the epic Super Bowl III and have yet to return.
The playoff misery that started percolating on Christmas 1971, the fateful 27-24 double-overtime loss to the Dolphins, bubbled over in the decades since with a hideous sequence.
The Chiefs didn’t even return to the playoffs until the 1986 season and didn’t win another playoff game until 1991. Then they won two in the 1993 postseason only to have that dissolve into fool’s gold.
More than 20 years would pass before they won another, an interval during which they lost eight playoff games in a row.
They were jinxed or cursed or some such, many fans came to assume. It ain’t paranoia when they’re really out to get you ... or at least when something always went wrong.
When hope flickered now and then, it inevitably would be promptly snuffed out. And that’s just how it was going to be: Only others get the luck and the glory and a magic unicorn.
Enter Andy Reid
Unbeknownst to us all, though, even amid the bleakness, imperceptible forces were forming and co-mingling and finally surging to animate this revival.
Something was gathering in the background all over North America, as it turns out, in the players and coaches who were on trajectories to joining the Chiefs.
Each of their stories is meaningful, but two were most pivotal.
A few months after the Chiefs won Super Bowl IV, Pat Mahomes Sr. was born in Bryan, Texas, and became a professional baseball player. In 1995, his wife, Randi, had a boy named Patrick.
In the early 1980s, Reid was trying to figure out what to do with his life. And the multi-talented man could have done about anything.
But his coach at Brigham Young, LaVell Edwards, nudged him toward coaching. When he was a grad assistant there, he got to know Mike Holmgren, who later hired Reid away from Mizzou to be an assistant with the Packers and set him on course to take over the Eagles in 1999.
Reid soon coaxed the Eagles to four straight NFC Championship Games, the last of those resulting in a Super Bowl berth. At the time, Reid figured if you go to one, “we can go to a million of them,” he recently said with a laugh.
But the Eagles lost that 2005 Super Bowl to the Patriots 24-21, a defeat marked by puzzling clock management and that to some affixed an asterisk to Reid’s otherwise sterling record: Win as his teams might in the regular season, skeptics figured, he somehow was destined never to be able to win it all.
By 2012, when Reid’s Eagles went 4-12 and he lost his job with his family engulfed in tragedy, it was unclear what his future held.
That same year, the Chiefs punctuated the tumultuous Scott Pioli era by going 2-14 in a season marked by a horrific off-field episode.
As Reid sought to move forward in the wake of the death of his son Garrett, the Chiefs tried to recover from that wretched two-win season — and linebacker Jovan Belcher’s murder of Kasandra Perkins and subsequent suicide at the Chiefs’ training facility near Arrowhead Stadium.
Somehow, the agonizing circumstances made the Chiefs and Reid perfect for each other, Reid and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt will tell you. The Chiefs hired Reid just days after he was let go by the Eagles.
A QB rises
Everything started to change almost immediately when Reid arrived, along with general manager John Dorsey, later replaced by Brett Veach, the man who nagged Reid incessantly about this prospect named Mahomes and later orchestrated a pivotal defensive overhaul.
The Chiefs won 11 games that first season after winning a total of 29 in the six before. Reid hasn’t had a losing season yet in Kansas City.
Yet the playoff fiascos continued. Starting with a stupefying 45-44 loss at Indianapolis, in a game the Chiefs had led 38-10, the Chiefs lost four of their first five postseason games in the Reid era.
A baseline was there, but so was that feeling of an invisible ceiling. Something special and crucial was missing.
Along came the transcendent Mahomes. After a redshirt year playing behind Alex Smith, to whom Mahomes will always be grateful, Mahomes’ infinite talents and ability to lift all around him was apparent almost immediately in his first season as a starter.
But even an MVP, it turned out, could only take the Chiefs so far. That was evident from their 37-31 overtime loss to the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game last season.
Even though no one play decides a game, linebacker Dee Ford became the public scapegoat for the loss after lining up offsides — a gaffe that offset a Charvarius Ward interception that could have sealed the game.
Piercing as it was, though, that loss was the impetus for what came next.
It led the Chiefs to fire defensive coordinator Bob Sutton and replace him with Steve Spagnuolo. And to a rewiring of that side of the ball that included trading Ford and acquiring defensive lineman Frank Clark and room- and mood-altering safety Tyrann Mathieu — each with their own fascinating and improbable paths here.
With all that, the Chiefs got better, but apparently luckier, too.
Maybe 50 years’ worth at once.
You could point to a lot of things that backed that up this season, but nothing more than what happened after Mahomes was left writhing in pain on the field in Denver because of a dislocated kneecap.
For a moment, we all had to wonder if his season was over.
Then the knee simply was snapped back in place, and, presto, Mahomes winced for an instant but was walking on his own moments later and back on the field in a few weeks. The Chiefs came to talk about “championship swagger” as the season went on, but maybe nothing spoke to that more than this scene.
And then there was how Miami itself played into this, perhaps offering some cosmic payback for the ripples of what it inflicted in 1971.
The Chiefs were bolstered along the way here by Dolphins discards Damien Williams, who played a key role Sunday, and Matt Moore, who nimbly filled in for Mahomes in the time he was out.
Their playoff path was made easier by the lowly Dolphins beating New England 27-24 after losing to the Patriots 43-0 earlier in the season, a result that gave the Chiefs a bye and a No. 2 seed that led to playing at home against Houston and Tennessee.
When they rallied from a 24-0 deficit against the Texans, it seemed something fundamental had changed in the Chiefs’ mojo.
Even if the past made you wary, you could certainly dare hope it represented a turning point. And then some, it turned out: a portal back to another dimension that the Chiefs stood in by the end of Sunday night when they drove a stake through their demons.
Now, with Mahomes and a young nucleus and a liberated Reid and lessons learned from their own past, this prosperity appears built to last a few years ... but it’s still rare and fragile enough to be worthy of savoring in its own right.
This story was originally published February 2, 2020 at 10:36 PM.