Chiefs Fans Wait In Calm Before The Storm

Addicts, as far as anyone can tell we are standing on the precipice of what promises to be a whirlwind of free agency and minicamps as players and coaches scramble to get ready for the upcoming season after the lockout ends.  As far as all reports are concerned a deal is very very very close to being completed, or to follow their rhetoric, “The lockout is almost over, unless it’s not, but if it isn’t than it will be soon, unless of course it ends later than sooner, but, well, ah you get the point.”

Realistically I do not think anyone has any idea what’s going on.  In the meantime that leaves the players, coaches, and fans stuck in the awful wake of uncertainty, left with nothing to do but speculate and hope.  Daily I hear of reports from “some guy who once saw a news article about the lockout” or “someone who was cleaning the toilets in the stadium after a Jonas Brothers concert” that decidedly say the lockout is almost over, to hang on, to bla-bla-bla.  I hate to sound cynical, but this seems more like a device to keep people listening and reading than real reporting.  I will believe what I hear when it is from the mouth of a credible source, until then I will disregard it like I do all of the fake websites showing what the iPhone 5 will look like.

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We grow weary as fans, readers, and writers which you can see reflected in both the posts on any blog as well as the shrinking comments sections.  In response to the question that Taylor posed earlier this week, I believe if you are reading this than you are already in the top 2% of Chiefs fans, because despite the NFL being locked out for over 100 days you are still reading daily blogs on a Chiefs website.  That is the kind of dedication and sense of community that keeps me interested in both reading and writing for this website.

Yet there are unforeseen gifts in all of this waiting, a silver lining on the turd-bucket of the NFL lockout:

• Much like how a cracker seems a delicacy to a starving man, once the gates open each and every piece of actual news coming from 1 Arrowhead Drive will seem like blockbuster news after the last three and a half months.  Each little personnel move, every report from practice, and yes even every Todd Haley rhetorical nightmare of a press conference will appear to be monumental.
• The slow trickle of offseason news that has built up behind the dam of the lockout will be released.  The result of which will be a massive rush of information to quench the parched palette of our arid NFL news landscape.
• If a deal is struck in time to keep from lost games, this mad dash by the GM’s, coaches, agents, and players will carry us steadfastly into the pre-season and thus the regular season.  We will have ended our waiting and football will be back.

These may seem small consolations for the long period of nothingness we have endured, but realistically there is nothing else we can do to make it easier.  I don’t expect any sort of fan appreciation from the league for sticking it out through the lockout, so we have to rearrange the set of circumstances to make them seem better than they are.

For right now Addicts, we still have some waiting to do.  For how long no one seems to be certain (unless it ends between the time I schedule this and the time it posts, which would be freakin’ awesome), but what we do know is that we are not waiting for nothing.  Once the hammer falls on this deal there will be a fierce whirlwind of events to keep track of.  We are in the presence of the calm before a great offseason storm, waiting impatiently for the silence to break.