The Morning Fix

“He came up with the name ‘Tamba-Hawk’ and he started calling me ‘Tamba-Hawk,’” Hali explained. “One game he was like, ‘go ahead and do it’ after I got a sack.”

Despite Allen’s encouragement, it took a while for Hali to get comfortable performing his own celebration in front of a crowd.

“I was a little nervous because I wasn’t used to celebrating– you know at Penn State we don’t celebrate, we just get amped up,” Hali remembered. “Jared had ‘The Bull’ so I had to come up with something. Being able to flap my wings after a sack is the hawk, like you just got hawked.”

“It’s a tremendous honor and something that I’m very proud of,” McGraw said. “The award is part of a tremendous organization that has a long line of special players and special human beings that have been recognized through it.”

Named in honor of longtime Colts athletic trainer Ed Block, the Ed Block Courage Award has been known as one of the NFL’s most prestigious honors since 1983.

“I didn’t know if that was going to work, but I didn’t know what else would have worked at that time,” he said this week during a calmer time. “I did know that if we’d kept playing the way we were playing in the first half, we were going to lose that game. I had to do something.

“Fortunately, we responded.”

The Chiefs gave up 89 points in the season’s first two games, but since the rant the defense has been a different animal. As a mater of fact, since halftime in Indianapolis, the Chiefs have allowed just one touchdown in 10 quarters.

It was just last season that a winless Buffalo Bills team came into Arrowhead and nearly crashed Kansas City’s Halloween party with its first victory of the season.

It took the division-leading Chiefs all five quarters to put away the Bills 13-10 on an overtime field goal as time expired.

“Paying attention to just the record with this team will be very dangerous and you would pay for it dearly from our perspective,” Haley said. “This is a well-coached team, a team that like you said has not only been in close games, but the teams that they have played are pretty strong teams.