Tony Gonzalez’s career doesn’t belong to Kansas City Chiefs

The fact that Tony Gonzalez drew the ire of many fans for his recent comments only highlights a fan base that plays the victim card when they don’t need to.

I guess this is going to be a theme for me.

Even in the midst of having the new face of the NFL and freshly minted MVP as their present and future, Kansas City Chiefs fans just have to find a way to play victim. The Chiefs are finally among the teams at the center of the NFL universe, and fans are still clawing for ways to pretend they’re treated as lesser-than. It’s exhausting. Make no mistake, this is directed 100% at you, Chiefs Kingdom; stop acting like infants. The world doesn’t revolve around you, and Tony Gonzalez doesn’t have to kneel at the Arrowhead altar and credit it with his entire career.

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Gonzalez was great. He would have been great anywhere he went. We were lucky enough to watch him be great in K.C. for 12 years. So what was it that Gonzalez said that was beyond the pale for his thank you Tweet to Chiefs fans to be flooded with everything from calls for him to be removed from the Chiefs’ Ring of Honor, to the prerequisite keyboard tough-guy posturing, to a dude wiping his feet on his #88 jersey? It must have been horrible, right?

"“You know what, Falcons, honestly, it made my career to come here. It really did. Nothing against Kansas City, I was there twelve years, but only three playoff games. But when I got to Atlanta it’s like all of a sudden you’re part of this winning organization or on TV every week. Now I’m doing Monday Night Football game, Sunday Night Football games. I love it here. I love being back here.”"

Really, Chiefs fans? That’s what got you so heated you’re losing your collective minds? Sheesh, y’all are a sensitive bunch.

Growing up in Indiana, I often felt frustrated being so far removed from other Chiefs fans during football season. You never get that experience of being a part of a tight-knit community of fans when you’re 500 miles away from your favorite team. Over the last 10 or 15 years, though, I’ve come to appreciate some aspects of that separation from the bubble—the one that can sometimes become an echo chamber for a victim mentality.

It’s clear outside the bubble that Gonzalez’s national recognition spiked dramatically when he left the Chiefs for the Atlanta Falcons. By 2009 he’d become yet another mostly-forgotten great player stuck on an awful team. Perhaps not fading to obscurity, he was certainly fading to the second or even third tier of stars as far as the cachet his name carried among fans outside of K.C. Going to Atlanta and being on a winning team changed that. His years with the Falcons are what cemented his legacy, and therefore “made” his career. It turned him from a Chiefs’ legend into an NFL legend. This isn’t rocket science.

In the five seasons Gonzalez spent in Atlanta he experienced four straight winning seasons and went to the playoffs in three straight years. In his twelve years in Kansas City he was a part of five winning seasons and never won a playoff game. It’s not difficult to see why Atlanta was greener pastures in 2009.

And let’s not forget the divorce between the Chiefs and Gonzalez wasn’t exactly amicable. Gonzalez had every reason to believe he was headed to Green Bay in 2008, and instead, he ended up stuck with the floundering Chiefs for another year. If he has lingering negative feelings toward the organization, I wouldn’t blame him. But even with his rocky end in K.C., that frustration has never been something he’s extended to the Chiefs’ fan base.

Since retirement, both in his CBS and FOX gigs, he’s always spoken highly of Arrowhead Stadium, Chiefs fans, his former teammates, and his entire experience as a member of that community. When he made those comments about Atlanta, he was in Atlanta. He was speaking to Atlanta media. Of course, he’s going to praise the Falcons. Of course, he’s going to make that fan base feel like they’re vitally important to his legacy. Whether you want them to be or not, they are.

What exactly should Gonzalez feel indebted to the Chiefs for? He spent over a decade being the absolute best tight end in football only to have five years of healthy Trent Green to serve as the lone moment of relief from the misery factory pumping out Elvis Grbac, Damon Huard, Brodie Croyle, and Tyler Thigpen as his quarterbacks. I shouldn’t have to remind you that if Gonzalez didn’t split, his final years would have been capped off with Matt Cassel. Instead, he got Matt Ryan. Perhaps not the Aaron Rodgers he could have had, but at worst, Ryan was equal to Green in those years.

The Chiefs were largely abysmal from the late 2000s all the way through 2012. They never built a consistent winner during Gonzalez’s tenure, and they were never going to. You can’t blame a player for wanting out of an organization that had faded so far from the perennial contender they were when they drafted him. For the Chiefs to pull the rug out from under Gonzalez in 2008 when he wanted so desperately to move on made the front office look like a bunch of jerks—not Gonzalez.

This is the kind of thing that highlights another toxic element of fan culture. Undying love and support of their team can allow an organization to get away with a lot that would cause those same fans to be livid if their own bosses tried to pull something similar.

Granted, Carl Peterson is long gone and the front office is entirely different today than it was in 2008, but ownership is still the same, and sometimes old wounds heal slowly. If Gonzalez is still a bit bitter about losing so much over those years, then fans should see that player as someone who shared their sentiments. I think some fans forget just how sick of the Chiefs’ incompetence they were in the 2000s. Or perhaps they feel as if players should feel as obligated as fans do to stick around through that mess. If it’s the latter, I’d suggest the only time that’s even a little true is when there’s a reason to have confidence in the organization to build a winner. Gonzalez, rightfully, didn’t have that confidence.

There’s only so much losing a player can take. Their careers are finite, and wallowing in mediocrity isn’t a particularly attractive prospect even for millions of dollars. Fans get to be fans their entire lives. That’s why sticking through the awful times is an expected part of fandom. Players don’t have the luxury of a lifetime of playing, and if they know they’re trapped in an environment where winning isn’t in their future, there’s nothing wrong with their competitive natures driving them to leave. There’s also nothing wrong with those players acknowledging that reality and being open about their frustrations.

It’s 2019, and the Chiefs future is finally bright. Tony Gonzalez was never going to make it to 2019 as a player. His departure was the first signal that something was wrong with the Chiefs at an organizational level. It wasn’t until 2013 that Clark Hunt finally made the changes needed to put the team back on the right path. Gonzalez was right; the Chiefs were a mess.

It’s time to grow up, Chiefs fans. You’re not the victim. Tony Gonzalez doesn’t hate you. It’s time to stop needing external validation to feel comfortable in loving your team.

The Chiefs aren’t losers anymore, but all this anger and entitlement sure has the fan base acting like it.