Media Hates Chiefs ‘Cuz They Force Them To Focus On Football
John Rieger-USA TODAY Sports
The Kansas City Chiefs are 8-0, but outside of Chiefs’ Kingdom, not everybody is celebrating Kansas City’s undefeated season.
Just look around Twitter and you’ll find all kinds of opinions on the Chiefs. Some, mostly Chiefs fans, are elated. Others, despite the 8-0 record, still don’t believe Kansas City is for real.
The Chiefs might be the worst 8-0 team I've ever seen
— Pete Prisco (@PriscoCBS) October 27, 2013
The Chiefs are STILL undefeated after knocking off the Browns! 8-0, and only like 5 of them against teams with random new starting QB's!
— SB Nation (@SBNation) October 27, 2013
The Chiefs should get a bye week in the playoffs, which means they'll lose in the divisional round, not the wild card round.
— John Hansen (@Fantasy_Guru) October 27, 2013
way to pull out a close one vs the browns RT @PlzGoInhaleH20: Can't wait to hear @bomani_jones hate on my Chiefs this week... #HatersGonHate
— bomani (@bomani_jones) October 27, 2013
That last hashtag from who I can only presume is a Chiefs fan really tells you all you need to know, Addicts. Haters are going to hate.
The Chiefs aren’t perfect, I don’t think anybody would argue that they are, but the fact remains that in the NFL, you are what your record says you are.
No win is easy in this league, no matter what the pundits want to say, so the fact that the Chiefs haven’t lost a game this season is incredibly impressive. Other teams have had easy schedules, yet haven’t run the table.
Bad teams don’t go 8-0. Hell, good teams don’t go 8-0.
It takes an extremely talented and cohesive unit to run half the table of an NFL schedule, and that’s exactly what the Chiefs have.
It may not be pretty, it may not look like the Patriots or Packers or any of the other elite teams we’ve seen in the last decade, but it’s undoubtedly 8-0.
You just can’t argue with that.
At the end of the day, a win’s a win. It doesn’t go into the record book with an asterix that says (ugly game) or (close one) and it certainly doesn’t go into a computer or comity that is able to devalue the meaning of a win.
Part of the reason we love the NFL so much is because it’s a clear-cut league. The best teams make the playoffs, and from there it only comes down to winning.
Win and you move on. A playoff win is still a playoff win regardless if it comes by a last second field goal to win by one, or a blowout win by 27.
A win is a win, and Kansas City has eight of them.
Haters can hate all they want, but that doesn’t change the overall record of this team.
Despite the success of surprise parties, there’s a part of me that believes people don’t like surprises—and that’s especially true when they’re in the national media.
Sports media today is predicated around arguments and debate. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Who predicted which teams will go to the playoffs, and really, who has the biggest sports brain out there?
Take it from me, because I am one. Media personalities are egotistical self-righteous children pretending to be grownups.
They can’t stand being wrong and they always want to be the smartest person in the room. If they didn’t see it coming or didn’t “call it”, it must be some kind of anomaly or trick.
It must not be legitimate.
Let’s face it, even we at Arrowhead Addict didn’t see the Chiefs going 8-0, so imagine how silly some of these national pundits must feel?
They’re the so-called experts, after all.
The Chiefs being 8-0 is essentially a slap in the face to everything the NFL and NFL media has become nowadays.
How can a team be good without an elite quarterback with a model girlfriend or a shoe deal? How can a team that relies on a grind-it-out style that isn’t always exciting be the best team in the league?
No unruly players? No scandals? No drama?
John Rieger-USA TODAY Sports
How can we create a “controversial take” or argue about this?
For as much as the hipster-esque mass media doesn’t want to accept him as one of their own, NFL media has taken on the personality of Skip Bayless.
If it’s not flashy we don’t want to talk about it. If there are no huge personalities is must not be interesting.
Where are the Bible-thumping pretty boy quarterbacks or man-whore, Twitter obsessed superstars?
Where is TMZ? Where is the celebrity connection to this team? When’s the last time you saw Alex Smith or Tamba Hali on a Gillette commercial, or any of the Chiefs in a pop-culture magazine for that matter?
The media doesn’t like the Chiefs because the Chiefs force them to focus on what is becoming increasingly boring to them—football.
It forces them to applaud solid special teams, a reliance on a steady run game and a quarterback who does enough to put his team in a position to win.
It forces them to put the spotlight on the fact that an ugly win is still, in fact, a win. So what if it doesn’t feature huge personalities, sound bites, off-field drama or SportsCenter highlights?
So what if the offense doesn’t put up 42 points per game?
A win is still a win.
That’s the one thing that the media pundits can’t argue, and that’s what makes them so upset.
Despite the fact that the Chiefs fly in the face of everything that they’ve built in today’s NFL-media culture, the boring team from a small city far from any beaches, coasts or media-hubs is the best team in the NFL.
John Rieger-USA TODAY Sports
No matter how much they argue that, the record book speaks to that fact.
So Chiefs fans, let the haters hate. At the end of the day, the Chiefs record is the only thing that matters.
Next time somebody tries to devalue the undeniable success of your team, all you need to do is look at them and say the one, universally unchallenged phrase in sports.
“Scoreboard”.