What Berry Means For The Chiefs
Eric Berry is finally a Chief. Seems predestined, doesn’t it?
This has been the most fun one draft season could ask for leading up to this selection. A hundred names bandied about, all of them presenting unique opportunities and dramatically different options for a team trying to establish an identity on both sides of the ball. The Kansas City Chiefs are a team harboring as much hope as any franchise in professional sports. I think it’s safey to say that this trend will continue.
My thoughts continue after the jump.
The Berry roller coaster deserved to end here. We went through so many different crises of confidence that it bordered blasphemy to even imagine Berry in any other kind of uniform. He belongs in Kansas City, a franchise that is slowly starting to remember defense after a decade where we put it on the backburner, following a classic era where we were defined by it.
I’m not ready to yet call Eric Berry the next Derrick Thomas-level impact defensive player for this franchise. Compare Berry to the team’s patron saint? Now that’s blasphemy. Instead, I will argue that Berry is a desperately needed signal to this fanbase that we are finally getting the smarter, faster, stronger players this team needs. I pray the rest of the Chiefs’ Draft foregoes much investment in the trenches (although a nose tackle and OL depth would be nice…), just so they can continue in the Eric Berry vein of getting this team playmakers that will get this fanbase excited again.
Chiefs fans are a sleeping giant right now. It won’t take much to bring back the ferociousness of Arrowhead. But Bulaga doesn’t do it. Tyson Jackson hasn’t done that. Eric Berry is the first serious signal we’ve received signaling Pioli’s understanding that we need more than hardhat worker bees. We need blue chips, and game breakers, and while Jamaal has given our offense an identity, this pick gives us an overdue compliment for the defense.
Whatever picks the Chiefs continue to make to beef up this defense, one thing is official: Eric Berry has just become its face.
Ultimately, this was the choice of one man. But I keep getting the impulse to say we did it. All engaged Chiefs fans everywhere, who fight for this team on barstools and in pews and in class and at the watercooler. All Chiefs fans who paint their cheeks red and gold on gameday in half-cocked arrowhead shapes. There have been entire games where the willpower of Chiefs fans kept this team going on the Arrowhead turf. Something tells me we have a hand in the war room on Draft Day as well.
Go Chiefs.