Ingram's May 2024

WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, THE KANSAS CITY CHIEFS’ CURRENT DYNASTIC PERFORMANCE BELIES MUCH OF THE TEAM’S HISTORY OVER THE PAST HALF CENTURY.

by Dennis Boone

I magine an NFL franchise that wins two games and loses 14 in a season. Then repeats that sorry perfor mance four seasons later. Who would we be talking about? The Cleveland Browns? Detroit Lions? Tampa Bay? Nope. That would be none other than your Kansas City Chiefs. They sandwiched those lamentable two seasons of 2008 and 2012 around just 21 regular-season victories strewn across the intervening three seasons. For fans who jumped on the red and gold bandwagon after Andy Reid

it’s not even close: At 143-58, they’re 15 victories ahead of No. 2 on the list, the New England Patriots. That gives Reid a 71.14 winning percentage in Kansas City. To see why the current run may be as good as it gets, put his record into the context of the Chiefs’ all-time performance. Even with Reid’s accom plishments, the franchise isn’t far above the break-even mark in winning per centage: 54.78 percent over the course of 983 NFL games. Exclude the 10 seasons of ele

two Super Bowl appearances before the wheels fell off. As a long, slow decline set in fol lowing the 1971 AFC title game loss to the Miami Dolphins, Chiefs fans went into a Super Bowl funk that would eventually hit 50 years. Along the way, the team compiled a record of playoff frustration that many still can’t shake: Lin Elliott, the blown lead of 28 points (both games against the Colts), road blocks thrown up by New England and Buffalo. Heck, even Joe Montana couldn’t get the Chiefs back to the title game. Kansas City has now appeared in four of the past five Super Bowls and is poised in the 2024 season to make it four straight—only the Buffalo Bills and Minnesota Vikings have ever done that, and without a single victory between them. Should the Chiefs win, they’d be the first team in the history of the post AFL-NFL merger to claim three consecutive Lombardi Trophies. On the surface, the key pieces for another successful run are locked in place. Mahomes will continue to be the foundation upon which the offense is built, and with the ink now dried on his $157.75 million contract, Chris Jones is, in theory, locked up for the next five seasons, likely carrying him to

Kansas City has now appeared in four of the past five Super Bowls and is poised to become the first NFL team to win three in a row.

showed up and went 9-0 to start his first season as head coach—and those who clambered aboard in the Patrick Mahomes’ era—it’s hard to overstate, but it’s true: This is indeed the golden age of Kansas City pro football. Since Reid came riding to the rescue, the Chiefs have recorded the best combined record in the NFL, and

vated performance under Marty Schottenheimer from 1989-1998, when a 104-65 record yielded wins 61.54 percent of the time, and the overall mark from the 40 other seasons falls to just 47.42 percent—pretty close to the very definition of mediocrity. And that includes Hank Stram’s 1960-1974 stretch that produced the team’s first

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Ingrams.com

May 2024