The Chiefs and football: A passion play

The recent Kansas City Chiefs draft class has had me reflecting about my relationship with football this week.

From as early as I can recall, me and my brothers were playing football. We played football in the living room. We played table-top football with a folded-up triangle of paper. We played Nerf football.

I played on a 6th grade team, high school JV, an Intramural Team in college and I devoted three years towards a coaching degree in college. Football was the number one reason for three left knee surgeries so, you could say my life has been one non-stop fervor for football.

For me, football has always been a passion play. However, I would never trade football for my values. I can’t set aside the standards of my character for a game. While many have come to believe the people who run the Kansas City Chiefs have sacrificed their values to football, I’m not so sure. No game is played in a vacuum or a bubble, one without real human feeling but the league may be headed there.

I’m afraid the NFL is becoming an aberrant version of “The Longest Yard.” The Longest Yard is a movie about a game of football played between hateful prison guards and inmates but, it’s the inmates/criminals who become the sympathetic characters in that storyline.

The Kansas City Chiefs franchise, under the close care and command of Clark Hunt since his father died 10 years ago, have traditionally touted their ideal of only bringing in people of high character with family values.

Dave Skretta, who writes for the Springfield New-Leader, published a piece this week called, “Chiefs gamble on trio of players” in which he quotes Clark Hunt,

"“Not everybody is going to be the kind of leader that you would like, that you draft, but certainly you want the majority of the guys to be like that.”"

That sounds like a change in direction.

If the Chiefs were a rock group, they’d be called, “One Direction… or Another.”

It sounds like this regime is poisoning the well.  Has the era of high character and family values just been flushed down the crapper? Is the local professional football franchise, which bears the name of our beloved city, now asking it’s good citizens to cheer for criminals and men of questionable character?

Or, is it possible that we’re prematurely casting stones? And… has there been an over-reaction to the prospects John Dorsey has just drafted?

Let’s take each of these adults  the Chiefs have drafted (and please, Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Reid, could you stop calling them “kids”) and examine the human side of who they are, and where we’re at, with each of these fallible souls. Plus, let’s do that long before we begin to criticize or critique how they might or might not function on the field of play. First, let’s see what their inner makeup is before projecting how their ability to catch a ball has them fitting in as a member of 53 humans acting out a child’s game.

Next: Just who is Tyreek Hill?