When it comes to psychology of the repeat, Chiefs have demonstrated many vital traits
In the delirium after the Chiefs’ dizzying Super Bowl rally to beat the San Francisco 49ers in February, defensive tackle Chris Jones sat at a podium and declared one wasn’t enough.
“Two, three, four,” he said, thumping his hand on a table repeatedly for emphasis. “We’ve got to build a dynasty here. You know what I’m saying?”
It was just what you might expect of the ever-animated Jones. And it’s doubtless the sort of thing that many in the fever of such a moment might proclaim.
It’s also far easier said than done. And that’s merely to repeat, let alone blossom into what Merriam-Webster.com defines as “a powerful group or family that maintains its position for a considerable time.”
Historically speaking, anyway, the franchise and its fans are intimately acquainted with that: After their three previous championship seasons, all as members of the AFL before the merger with the NFL, the Chiefs didn’t even qualify for the postseason in the considerably tighter playoff fields of the times.
More recently and broadly, no NFL team has repeated as Super Bowl champions since the New England Patriots became the seventh to do it 15 years ago. In that span, five champions failed to earn playoff berths a season later and just two returned to the Super Bowl to fall short there.
Safe to say that entering the postseason with the AFC No. 1 seed and its accompanying bye week and a 14-2 record (14-1 when the varsity suited up), the Chiefs have navigated the preliminaries better than most.
Even amid the pandemic, even with their title typically inspiring the best in other teams, they’ve managed it rather seamlessly to this stage.
That’s for a number of reasons, including organizational harmony, continuity and cohesion among a nucleus of young stars led by Patrick Mahomes and the adaptability and leadership of coach Andy Reid.
Vital to the cause was that Reid understood from the start that an enemy of complacency could lurk within.
It’s human nature, after all, to relax after you’ve reached the pinnacle or otherwise lack the same motivational hunger as before.
But that potential original sin of sorts that might have been a hindrance, or even an undoing, was defused early and often through Reid’s vision, Mahomes’ relentlessness and a thriving culture.
In that world, safety Tyrann Mathieu said, perhaps the impending shutdown caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus actually helped flip the switch from basking in celebration to turning forward.
“Not really being able to enjoy it (most of the offseason) kind of helped ...,” he said. “Right there, instantly, you just looked forward to the next season. You look forward to winning it again. You look forward to the process. You look forward to committing to your teammates.”
With extreme emphasis on committing, Mathieu suggested, as he considered what the traits of a repeat champion might entail.
“To team,” he said. “I think when you win a Super Bowl, a lot of guys get paid, a lot of guys, you know, grow egos.”
Or could, anyway. But the variables of staying bonded with and believing in each other sure seemed affirmed through the regular season.
And that was of inestimable value … to this point, anyway.
“They stayed humble with it; it wasn’t something that they counted on or beat their chest on that they were the Super Bowl champs,” Reid said.
Even if that purged a wretched modern postseason history for the Chiefs. And even if it recast how many see Reid, who until last season was gaining a reputation as the best coach never to win a Super Bowl.
When Reid was asked if the Super Bowl triumph had lifted a weight from him, he first joked that he’d put on a “late-season bulge.” But then he gave an answer about his own personal view that also spoke more broadly to why this has gone this way.
Approaching the process as “like a washing machine going around and around and around,” he said, “kind of eliminates those outside issues that you might think about. And if you exhaust yourself on that part, I think it helps you with the other stuff. The clutter that might come in.”
So far, so good.
Still, here we are, on the cusp of the defining part of the season and knowing past performance is no guarantee of future results.
A particularly deep and thorny field in the AFC awaits, to say nothing of prospective Super Bowl opponents, and the Chiefs are far from perfect. That’s perhaps well-encapsulated in the double-edged fact that they won eight games by six points or fewer, including seven in a row by a total of 27 points.
Which brings us to both some sobering and reassuring dynamics to consider in the road ahead as deftly illuminated by my longtime friend Richard Keefe.
First, the hard statistical truth about repeating and the tendency toward regression to the mean:
“When the absolute winner is declared, they’re there on the basis of being really good plus chance events,” he said. “So that means the next year they could be just as good and not have those chance events work out on a couple things and then they fall back.
“So it’s not really that they weren’t as good; they just didn’t have the things going for them that they need to win.”
This might seem particularly applicable to the Chiefs, who were endlessly deserving champions last season given their historic trio of playoff comebacks from double-digit deficits to win.
But it’s also easy to remember some of the fortune the Chiefs enjoyed in what might be considered random events that went their way.
Consider, for instance, Mahomes’ remarkable recovery from what appeared to be a devastating knee injury; the playoff configuration changing with a 5-11 Miami team upending defending champion New England in the regular-season finale; top-seeded Baltimore’s upset at the hands of Tennessee and Houston’s ill-considered fake punt leading the Chief by 17 points.
To be clear, that doesn’t diminish those Chiefs in any way. The Chiefs obviously seized the moment, and that’s a key part of the psychology of this moment … if applied optimally.
To some degree, it’s clear they already have: Any concern they weren’t as hungry because they’d been fed, as Keefe put it, seemingly was answered by their response to the grind of the regular-season. They seem to understand his crucial point that “the past is just a trophy somewhere.”
Not that it can’t help in some way to know they’ve done it before. Perhaps paradoxically, though …
“Only if you can forget it: Like, ‘Yes, I can do this, but I haven’t done it this time,’ ” Keefe said.
By way of example, he pointed to a golfer with a 3-foot putt to win. If the approach is, “I’ve made 1,000 of these this year, and all I have to do is just be myself, just do me” then that’s the right mindset.
But trouble looms if it’s a feeling of, “I’ve done this, and therefore I don’t need to bear down” and take the preparation and routine as seriously.
Then “you’re living in your mind, you’re living in the gratification you got in the past,” he said. “And if you’re living in your mind as an athlete, you then are not living engaged with what you’re doing.”
Meanwhile, though, there’s something encouraging to consider in the psychological DNA of this team: the other side of the narrow wins that suggest they may be vulnerable.
If there’s been some luck involved, well, that can have a way of feeding off itself.
Remember the old maxim of the harder you work, the luckier you get? Or something Stanley Kowalski says in “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams: “You know what luck is? Luck is believing your lucky.”
When you have a team that tends to win and players who believe in themselves, Keefe said, they’ll look into the perceptual field and see opportunities instead of threats.
That’s perfectly embodied in the endlessly resilient and resourceful Mahomes.
“You know his psychology has to be, ‘I can do this. Where is it? Where’s the lock that fits this key?’ ” Keefe said. “ ‘Because I have a key.’ ”
And so the Chiefs have turned the engine over toward some rare history in their grasp … all the more so if they can hold tight to the elusive effortless present.