With ‘certain strength within’ built over time, Chiefs’ chemistry thrives amid pandemic
Back in The Before Times at the Chiefs’ training complex near Arrowhead Stadium, the epicenter of the locker room in some ways was a basketball hoop and the spectacle around it.
An interloper might wander into a fevered two-on-two game, some version of H-O-R-S-E, or customized competitions at times vigorous enough to make you wonder if someone was bound to get hurt.
Or perhaps you’d see Patrick Mahomes, in a towel and flip-flops headed to the shower, casually pick up the ball, calculate in the relatively low ceiling and launch a perfect shot from the distance that left teammates shaking their heads and laughing.
The hoop, alas, was brought down by the pandemic.
Back in the day, in their adjacent lockers in one corner of the room on a typically casual Friday, defensive tackles Chris Jones and Frank Clark might be singing alongside each other to the music of, say, H.E.R.
“I’m the vibe and the energy; Chris is like the best hype man you could ever have for yourself,” Clark said last December, laughing and adding, “You can have your own party with us, man.”
Now, though, that particular party has been broken up. Or at least decentralized, with position groups mingled with each other to minimize frequency of contact in a socially distant locker room with only every other stall occupied and each buffered by plexiglass.
Way back a year ago, they’d all eat together, too, sometimes with 8-10 chairs pushed up to a table. Now it’s grab-and-go meals and eating on your own, or at least remotely enough to be considered safe from the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
To say nothing of how they congregated off the field, perhaps most notably about every Thursday night at the home of Tyrann Mathieu. He’d typically invite over every defensive teammate, ostensibly to watch Thursday Night Football but also to eat wings or maybe play cards or get their hair cut by the barber he’s been known to have over. Mostly, though, it was talking about everything from relationships to motivation, about how they grew up and life outside the game.
“Bonding,” Mathieu called it the other day.
With that, too, on hiatus because of the pandemic, it might seem that the Chiefs — like every other team — are stranded in a vacuum when it comes to cultivating something that was essential to their first Super Bowl triumph in 50 years: an almost palpable chemistry that you could discern even in the weeks before last postseason.
That vibe was no guarantee of anything, of course, just as it’s not necessarily a prerequisite, either. But in a sport that is so dependent on the faith and trust of the guy next to you, behind you or in front of you, you bet it matters if it can be harnessed.
“That energy leads straight to the field,” receiver Sammy Watkins said along the way last year.
Or as guard Laurent Duvernay-Tardif put it late last season, “Just creating that synergy and that energy, it really helps you, especially at this time of the year. You feel that you can sometimes give energy to somebody who needs it, or you feed off of somebody else.”
Which brings us to the matter of how they’ve gone about conjuring the intangible in the season of a pandemic from which Duvernay-Tardif, a medical doctor, opted out of the offensive line to serve on the front lines of fighting COVID.
Also opting out were running back Damien Williams and offensive lineman Lucas Niang, the Chiefs’ third-round draft pick last year.
Nevertheless, this aspect of the game has all the appearances of being another advantage for the Chiefs in a season in which continuity of players and coaches perhaps never has held more value.
A disjointed offseason, the rise of the machines such as Zoom and Cisco WebEx and contact tracing and so many more variables might have discombobulated or disrupted teams in flux or contending with cracks in the foundation.
But in the case of the Chiefs ...
“It’s a certain strength within that you build with time, and I think these guys have developed that,” coach Andy Reid said last week. “And they laugh and cry together. One of those deals. And they have a good feel on when to bear down and when to mess around. So that becomes important.”
Alluding to the 8-12 hours a day spent together even in masks and observing protocols, Mahomes said, “In a sense, it kind of brings people together.”
Reid is known for urging his players to let their personalities show.
But for all the carryover from last season, this expedition had to start with something else.
In the first-do-no-harm spirit of the season, Mathieu recalled last week, the table was set early by Reid and Rick Burkholder, the team’s vice president of sports medicine and performance who last year added the role of infectious control officer.
“‘It’s going to come down to’” managing COVID, Mathieu remembered them emphasizing immediately.
That set a tone the Chiefs seemed to embrace and that Reid reiterated Monday as they prepared to play the Cleveland Browns in an AFC Divisional playoff game on Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium.
“It’s the ultimate game of dodgeball, and you’re trying to dodge this son of a buck the best you can,” he said, later reminding of the essentials of masking, social distancing and frequent hand-washing.
While the Chiefs generally have navigated it well to date, the ultimate point is striving to thrive within it by repeating as champions. And their performance in the regular season (a franchise-best 14-2, No. 1 seed in the AFC, a knack for winning close games) suggests the group dynamics have only continued to flourish.
With no opportunities to see the living, breathing organism of the locker room because media access restrictions in the pandemic limit all direct interaction to Zoom interviews with a few players a week, we can only surmise what’s at play based on results, observable interactions and what’s shared on the calls.
But from the outside looking in, the composite picture sure seems to look like one in which they’ve simply switched lanes, literally in some ways, and made the most of their time together.
Starting, perhaps, with perspective:
Sure, they’re physically more apart more often than ever and often muzzled with masks. But this is a team teeming with sage leadership, particularly in the magnetic forms of Mahomes and Mathieu, and animated personalities that have by all indications have respected the circumstances and come to relish the shared adventure.
So they’ve found different ways to enjoy camaraderie, from the goofy Twitter profile changes to old images of teammates (or in the case of Mahomes, one of Reid) to Le’Veon Bell assuming the role of team DJ to Reid concocting exotic plays or just getting to know teammates they otherwise wouldn’t because of the revised locker room configuration.
For that matter, Mahomes said, contact tracers warning when they’ve been too close too long with a teammate even on the field makes them keep moving around to other teammates.
“Which could be a good thing, in a sense,” he said. “Because you’re talking to everybody on the team and not necessarily one person the entire time.”
It’s all part of creating their own personality within this confounding time. Even minus so much that they’ve known for so long, they’re still making their own vibe and energy — a force that could help sustain them in the weeks to come.
This story was originally published January 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.