KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Three years ago, the first modern Super Bowl triumph for the Chiefs and ensuing victory parade had a unique magic after a half-century in the making.
How long was the time in between? Consider that Patrick Mahomes’ father, Pat, wasn’t born until the August after the franchise’s Super Bowl IV victory in 1970.
“I’m glad it didn’t take another 50 years,” chairman and CEO Clark Hunt said Wednesday at Union Station.
But the parade on Wednesday, attended by hundreds of thousands in the wake of the Super Bowl LVII victory over the Philadelphia Eagles, was no less pulsating and thrilling.
Because this sort of thing can never get old for a city deprived for so long. And because what this championship lacked in novelty it made up for in substantial other dimensions.
This time around, it wasn’t about a revival after lost generations but sustaining a proposed new order after two years of falling short and murmurs of their demise.
Those rumors proved greatly exaggerated … even if it was mostly by players who found it useful to do so.
“The haters were saying the Chiefs were done,” bellowed tight end Travis Kelce in his best WWE mode.
More accurately, many figured the Chiefs could step back after trading superstar receiver Tyreek Hill to Miami and starting a youth movement on defense. But “rebuilding” was the insult the team took from those question marks.
“I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t know what rebuilding means,” Mahomes said. “In our rebuilding year, we’re world champs! We’re world champs!”
Or as general manager Brett Veach put it as he lifted the Lombardi Trophy: “This is what a rebuilding year looks like, right here.”
And this one, a tale in itself, does something the other couldn’t.
‘The environment is … life-changing’
Two Super Bowl victories in four years — not to mention another appearance in defeat — undoubtedly “solidifies your greatness,” as Kelce put it after the game.
Having played host to five straight AFC Championship Games, it also might be said that the Chiefs needed this validation lest they seem destined to win just one in the Mahomes Era no matter how much they might always be in contention.
Instead, they burst into the echelon bluntly but deftly declared by Pittsburgh great Dwight White in the NFL Films “America’s Game” documentary series episode on the 1975 Steelers:
“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.”
So consider these Chiefs memorable after opening a portal to a new frontier on the near horizon:
Only six franchises in NFL history have won more than the three Super Bowls the Chiefs have (including Super Bowl IV).
Only four coaches have won more than two.
Only four quarterbacks have won more than two.
With Mahomes a two-time NFL and Super Bowl MVP at just 27 years of age, and 64-year-old coach Andy Reid this week confirming his intentions to continue on, two essential elements are in place for more to come. That notion is enhanced by a seamless organizational harmony, including the vital front office work led by Veach and his staff.
That’s the dynamic owner Hunt referred to a few years ago as a “virtuous circle.” And it’s all the more notable because it emerged out of the vicious cycle culminating in a 2-14 2012 season.
And it tells you something about the sustainable winning culture and chemistry Reid’s regime has created.
“The environment is just life-changing,” receiver Kadarius Toney, inexplicably available for a pittance at midseason from the New York Giants, said after the Super Bowl. “You can just only imagine the coaches and the entire organization, just the energy you feel in the building day in and day out. It’s different. It makes you want to go out there and be the best player you can be.”
Which brings us to another momentous statement of this Super Bowl.
It came in what was widely considered a year of flux, or at least one of transition, after the Hill trade and all that set in motion.
And what we might reasonably anticipate about the future can be traced to how this season unfolded. Or, more to the point, how it was crafted.
Not throwing darts
Ten years ago last month, Hunt made the most pivotal decision in his tenure as owner by hiring Reid when he was let go by the Eagles.
The move almost instantly reset the franchise and made it virtually a perennial postseason team.
But it wasn’t until the Chiefs drafted Mahomes in 2017 and inserted him as their starter the next season that the Chiefs would begin to become the envy of the NFL.
Before long, success wasn’t just possible but began to seem inevitable. That was contrary to a well-earned defeatist mindset of the typical Chiefs fan — who couldn’t help but see things differently after Mahomes led the Chiefs to double-digit rallies in every postseason game on the way to winning Super Bowl LIV.
Mahomes has been spectacular ever since.
But back-to-back seasons of what he would refer to as “failure” that most anybody could only hope to achieve — losing in Super Bowl LV and falling in the AFC Championship Game last season — could make you wonder when, or even if, an encore could be delivered.
Especially after the Chiefs traded Hill, a future Pro Football Hall of Fame candidate, to the Dolphins for five draft picks last March.
At a glance, the move driven by Hill’s salary demands seemed a concession of the present to the future. Surely, it seemed, the Chiefs would have an offensive dropoff without Hill.
But trading Hill at the peak of his value didn’t just make the Chiefs more financially flexible in the long term.
It also enabled them to allocate money for a set of diversely talented new receivers who helped energize and stretch their offensive approach — starting with a camp Mahomes conducted with them in Texas.
It helped them focus on other areas of need, such as the defensive line and backfield, and it helped them make their defense faster and younger — a lot younger.
But six 2022 draftees made key plays in the AFC Championship Game victory over Cincinnati. Four started the Super Bowl, and seven played 10 or more snaps on either side of the ball.
As Veach put it after the Bengals game, “We didn’t go into the offseason just throwing darts.”
Meanwhile, though, they were plenty conscious of the perceived darts being thrown at them in the offseason.
‘Not chopped liver out there’
Never mind that the Chiefs had won six straight AFC West titles in addition to playing in four straight AFC title games.
The narrative in some circles was that between their apparent steps back and the revamping of the Denver Broncos, L.A. Chargers and Las Vegas Raiders, the Chiefs were going to be lucky to make the playoffs.
As a man of humility and tact with a disdain for bluster, Reid was restrained about that buzz.
But if you’ve been around him long enough, it was easy to interpret the message in training camp when he was asked yet again about dealing with an apparently much-improved division.
“You can take it as a badge of honor (and) crawl under the desk and be afraid,” he said in his Missouri Western dorm room one day. “My thing is, listen, let’s go. … We’re not chopped liver out there. We have some pretty good players. So let’s play.”
Even with his playful delivery, it was clear Reid was tired of the prattle. And he made another compelling point that day.
He suggested that he understood why his team had melted down in the second half against the Bengals in last year’s AFC title game and cost themselves another Super Bowl opportunity.
While declining to specify what went awry that he had “a pretty good feel” for, Reid said it was a combination of the mental and the physical and that the team had lacked “a certain attitude, certain edge that you’ve got to maintain.”
Few coaches understand the pulse of their team better than Reid. And that urgency was part of the message of yet another grueling training camp as the Chiefs were preparing for a daunting early schedule.
They lost two of their first five, one a bizarre hiccup at Indianapolis and the other to a Buffalo Bills team that had largely been anointed their successor atop the AFC.
Albeit sometimes in worrisome fashion, they went on to win their seventh straight AFC West title. And lead the NFL in scoring.
And win 11 of 12 entering an AFC Championship Game rematch against the Bengals — a nemesis that had beaten the Chiefs for the third time in a calendar year just weeks before.
The Chiefs’ 23-20 victory over Cincinnati in this year’s conference-title game purged the hangover from the defeat a year before that had fueled the Chiefs’ offseason, perhaps best personified in the utterly dominant game Chris Jones had after missing a couple of key potential sacks of quarterback Joe Burrow in 2022.
“I dedicated my whole offseason to making sure that when that moment calls, for me again, specifically, that I’ll answer the call,” Jones said after the game.
The victory also was defined by Mahomes’ courageous play with an ankle injury, including his late run that Hunt compared to “Superman putting on his cape.”
That propelled the Chiefs into one of the most compelling matchups in Super Bowl history.
A Super Bowl rich in storylines
For the first time in a Super Bowl, Black quarterbacks would start for each team and brothers would play for opposing teams.
Then there was the overarching matter of Reid vs. the Eagles franchise that had let him go … and former Chiefs assistant coach Nick Sirianni up against Reid — who didn’t retain him when Reid came here in 2013.
What ensued was a drama befitting the rich storylines and the twists within them.
Philly quarterback Jalen Hurts was brilliant for the Eagles, who largely shut down the Chiefs in the first half. But charged up by an impassioned Mahomes at halftime and orchestrated by masterful second-half offensive scheming by Reid and his staff, the Chiefs scored on every drive after intermission and again overcame a 10-point deficit in the fourth quarter of a Super Bowl.
They did it with a superb effort by the offensive line, which allowed no sacks against the top pass-rushing team in football — in considerable contrast to what befell the decimated Chiefs O-line against Tampa Bay two years before.
“Zero sacks. Put it on a damned T-shirt,” left tackle Orlando Brown said.
They did it with rookie Isiah Pacheco, who grew up a Philadelphia Eagles fan in nearby Vineland, N.J., rushing for 76 rugged yards.
They did it by seizing key moments, such as Nick Bolton’s 36-yard return of a fumble for a touchdown and Toney’s 65-yard punt return — the longest in Super Bowl history.
They did it with rookie Skyy Moore scoring his first career touchdown, and first-year Chiefs players Toney and Pacheco scoring, as well.
And with Kelce racking up his 16th postseason TD — second only to Jerry Rice in NFL history.
All of that reflected both coaching and the shrewd work of the front office with its drafting and alertness to acquiring players such as Toney, who was the 2021 first-round draft pick of the Giants.
But at the heart of it all and most indelibly, they did it with another Super Bowl MVP performance by the transformative Mahomes — the first quarterback to win the regular-season MVP and Super Bowl MVP in the same season since Kurt Warner did it for the Rams in 1999.
‘He wants to be the greatest player ever’
Just five years into his starting role, Mahomes has asserted himself as an international superstar with personal appeal nearly as infinite as his capacity to create and astonish.
He is everything you could ask for in a quarterback, teammate and ambassador for a city he loves and literally keeps investing in, with ownership stakes in the KC Current, Royals and Sporting KC.
He’s gracious and gritty, transcendent yet the ultimate teammate. Perfectly confident, but not cocky. A true sportsman. Easy-going but fierce and irrepressible — as he illustrated yet again after aggravating the ankle injury during the Super Bowl and hobbling off the field near the end of the first half.
“I knew there was blood in the water,” Jones said. “Because Pat is the type of competitor where if he’s hurt or he’s sick he wants to come back and show everybody that he’s even better now.”
Yes, he’s got an arm like few others. But that power is eclipsed by his mind, vision, desire, imagination and sheer sense of who he is and where he is at all times.
“Sometimes he does things so special,” Jones said, “that becomes normality for him.”
After the game, Mahomes, mic’d up for NFL Films, was greeted by his father, whose deeply personal words also spoke for how many of us feel about Mahomes.
“I ain’t never seen anything like you; you different,” he said as he hugged him. “You different. I love you.”
Because of the salary cap and other personnel decisions ahead, the Chiefs themselves will be different next year, with many difficult decisions ahead.
Even before the parade began, Reid was meeting with his players and the sands were beginning to shift. Nothing is ever guaranteed going forward.
But the past season was a vivid example of the franchise’s ability to navigate the pitfalls of the parity-oriented NFL.
Presto, a season that was supposedly going to be one step back for two forward later became … serenity now.
And with Mahomes and Reid at the epicenter as one of the most dynamic duos in sports history, don’t doubt the Chiefs will maintain that “certain attitude, certain edge” and that more parades are to come.
When I spoke with Veach at Super Bowl LVII last weekend, he said he believed Reid could coach 10 more years. And you can bet he’d like to coach Mahomes at least through the end of Mahomes’ current contract, which expires in 2032.
As for Mahomes?
“He wants to be the greatest player ever,” Reid said after the game. “That’s what he wants to do, and that’s the way he goes about his business.”
And why this last one also tells us something about what’s ahead.
“This,” Mahomes said, “is just the beginning.”
