To loom large in NFL lore, Chiefs must join the few to win back-to-back Super Bowls
The NFL Films “America’s Game” documentary series episode about the 1975 Pittsburgh Steelers commences with defensive end Dwight White’s blunt view on a fundamental difference between repeating as Super Bowl champions … or not.
“There are two categories of Super Bowl participants that nobody remembers,” he said. “One, the team that lost the game; and, two, the team that only won one.”
You might call that harsh or exaggerated. You might also call it undeniably true in a “straight, no-chaser way, regarding legacies and how teams are remembered.”
That’s how it was put by my friend Michael MacCambridge, a supreme NFL and Chiefs’ authority whose exhaustively researched and eloquently written books include “America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation,” biographies of Lamar Hunt and Chuck Noll and “ ‘69 Chiefs: A Team, A Season and The Birth of Modern Kansas City” — to which he referred me for White’s framing of the point.
“It’s totally unfair,” he said. “But it’s very apt.”
If it was apt then, when the Steelers were seeking (and ultimately prevailing) to become the third team to repeat in the first 10 Super Bowls, it’s become infinitely more so now for a variety of reasons that most notably include the advent and ensuing impact of the salary cap in the mid-1990s.
When they play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl LV on Sunday in Tampa, Florida, the Chiefs will be seeking to be the first NFL team to repeat as champions since the Patriots won the Super Bowls at the end of the 2003 and 2004 seasons.
In a certain cosmic symmetry to the dynamics of this scene, the latter was against the Philadelphia team of Andy Reid.
At the time, he had just coached the Eagles to their fourth straight NFC title game and figured “we can go to a million” Super Bowls, he said with a laugh last year ... but didn’t return until last season when he coaxed the Chiefs to their first triumph in 50 years.
Then as now, Reid and his team will seek to beat a Tom Brady-led team in the so-called ultimate game, one that would elevate these Chiefs to an elite tier that would resonate over time in an entirely different way than a one-time champion would.
They would stand in a place at least resembling the foundation of the Patriots’ six Super Bowls wins in less than 20 years. In what would be their third title in four years, the Patriots beat the Eagles 24-21 that day to become just the seventh NFL franchise and eighth team to enjoy the encore — a feat made all the more significant with each passing year.
Only time will tell about the Chiefs’ prospects for more yet after this season, but the notion of dynasty has been their mantra since moments after they beat the 49ers in Super Bowl LIV. And after an offseason, regular season and postseason spent delivering on the words, the most direct step toward that enduring ambition is this potential sequel.
Not that the rest of what they’ve done isn’t monumental in its own way. Particularly given the pandemonium of the pandemic, it was sure worth pausing to appreciate all it took just to get back to the Super Bowl after winning it, something only two other teams have done in Patrick Mahomes’ 25-year-old life.
“I certainly don’t take it for granted,” Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt said after the Chiefs beat Buffalo 38-24 in the AFC Championship Game. “It’s very difficult, as recent history has proved, for teams to get back to the Super Bowl or get back and win the Super Bowl. So, our job’s not done at this point, but I’m very proud of the guys and I think it’s really a testament to the quality of people that we have.”
Just not as compelling testimony as a repeat would be.
That’s because of the sheer force of gravity against it, including the essential psychological differences between being a challenger to the throne and having to fend off intensified efforts to topple you.
Not to mention the fact that virtually every championship requires both an ability to seize the moment and favorable twists of fate that may or may not be replicable.
Meanwhile, the air can get thinner at the precipice.
Sure, it’s should be reassuring for Chiefs fans that nearly all teams that have #RunItBack to win the Super Bowl have some common denominators.
Simply put, they enjoyed strong continuity in their lineups from one year to the next and were dependent in various ways on coaches and quarterbacks bound for the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr; Don Shula and Bob Griese; Noll and Terry Bradshaw (on two different occasions); Bill Walsh and Joe Montana; Jimmy Johnson and Troy Aikman; Mike Shanahan (potentially) and John Elway; Bill Belichick and Brady.
That sure sounds like familiar stuff when it comes to a Chiefs team guided by the fifth-winningest coach in NFL history, a stratospheric quarterback in Patrick Mahomes already on trajectory toward the Hall of Fame and tremendous constancy of personnel and staff from a year ago.
“I mean, I think you know when you have a Hall of Fame coach and you have the best player in the National Football League that you’re going to have a chance to win every game,” general manager Brett Veach said after the AFC Championship game.
Which is no guarantee at this stage, of course.
Because trouble is that the same characteristics generally can be seen in the five teams that made it back to the Super Bowl only to lose: the Cowboys from the 12th Super Bowl to the 13th; the Washington football team (though Joe Theismann isn’t in the Hall of Fame) from the 17th to the 18th; the Packers (with Reid as an assistant coach) from No. 31 to No. 32; the Seahawks from 48 to 49 and the Patriots from 51 to 52.
All of which reiterates that past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the most basic truth that every game makes for its own living, breathing and unique story. But the meaning of the quest nonetheless is well-clarified by its precedents.
In the beginning, of course, there were the Green Bay Packers, who made mincemeat of the Chiefs (35-10) of the upstart AFL in the inaugural Super Bowl and mulched the Raiders 33-14 in the encore.
Safe to say the AFL wasn’t quite ready for prime time even as it was headed toward some redemptive parity when the Jets and Chiefs won the next two before the full merger in 1970.
Lombardi and nine players on the first Super Bowl team went on to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and all but two were back the next year as quarterback Bart Starr earned MVP distinction in each game.
You might call those first two checkers vs. chess, but the game wasn’t quite so evolved yet, either.
“It was more like adults playing checkers vs a bright 11-year-old playing checkers,” MacCambridge said, reminding that the Packers of the era had about eight plays in their repertoire. “Because it was definitely checkers.”
To some degree, the same could be said when the Dolphins repeated in Super Bowl VII and VIII. It’s easy to forget that Griese threw just 11 passes in the first of those, a 14-7 win over Washington to culminate the last and only unblemished NFL season and only seven passes a year later in their 24-7 clobbering of Minnesota.
Also like the Packers’ repeat team, the Dolphins were stocked with future Hall of Fame players and coached by a legend in Don Shula, the winningest coach (347) in NFL history. And they, too, prospered by continuity: 20 players who started Super Bowl VII still were playing for the Dolphins a year later, including all 11 defensive starters.
You can trace may of these traits through the other five times the phenomenon occurred, whether the Noll/Steel Curtain teams that beat the Vikings and Cowboys back-to-back with MVP kudos to Hall of Famers Lynn Swann and Franco Harris … or in the Noll-coached iteration of the Steelers three years later that beat Dallas and the Rams back-to-back with Bradshaw as MVP.
We could go on with some of those similarities as they apply to the 49ers, Cowboys, Broncos and, finally, Patriots teams to follow in that path. But you get that idea, and this makes for a fine pivot point to the other side of the ledger: the teams that made it all the way back only to suffer the unique devastation of falling short.
The Chiefs hope to avoid what might be considered a form of suffering distinct from, say, losing any given year or in four of the first 11, as the Vikings did, or a stupefying four in a row as the Bills did from Super Bowls XV-XVIII.
Beyond the similarity of profiles among the teams that have returned and won and those who got back and lost is another notable point.
Toss out the blowout of Washington by the Raiders, and the other four came down to one-score games — each of which had its share of quirky plays emblazoned in NFL history that might well have gone otherwise.
That Cowboys’ 35-31 loss to the Steelers with a chance to repeat, alas, is forever associated with the great Jackie Smith’s improbable drop of a touchdown pass when Dallas was losing 21-14.
Along the way to dousing Green Bay’s hopes of repeating, Denver’s John Elway changed the tone of the game with his so-called “helicopter run” of 8 yards on third and 6 from the Packer 12 to set up the tying touchdown. “It energized us beyond belief,” Denver defensive lineman Mike Lodish said after the game, according to Sports Illustrated.
You probably remember the Eagles win over the Patriots in 2018 and such singular moments as the Philly Special touchdown pass to quarterback Nick Foles.
And who will ever forget Seattle coach Pete Carroll’s decision in 2015 to pass on second and goal at the Patriots 1 in the final seconds? The interception by Malcolm Butler preserved a 28-24 win for the Patriots to end the chance to become just the second to repeat since the turn of the century.
So as in any other game, one decision, one call, one bounce or one transcendent play can come to symbolize, if not define, the result.
It’s just that in this game it could stand for a whole lot more, too.
“Think of how different the perception of the Seattle Seahawks is if they’d run Marshawn Lynch” at the end of Super Bowl XLIX, MacCambridge said. “And also think of how different the perception of the New England Patriots is, because at that point the Patriots would have lost as many Super Bowls (three) as they would have won with Brady.”
So while the Chiefs might seem to have years ahead to establish a singular legacy, they may not have a million Super Bowl opportunities ahead, as Reid now knows.
Or even 150, as Mahomes recently joked Brady has enjoyed.
Which means this bears the urgency of being their last time around … lest this fertile chance be rendered a forgotten footnote in the unforgiving shorthand of time.
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM.