The Kansas City Chiefs are positioned to rule the next decade of NFL football and it all starts with star Patrick Mahomes.
Time doesn’t really exist. It’s not the air or the water. Our fellow animals of literally any other species have never had even an inkling of what it feels like to be running late (and we think we’re the smart ones).
So the end of a decade doesn’t really mean anything. Trends and fads come in waves at usually about five year intervals, but they are almost never perfectly boxed within the confines of a decade. Despite that, our belief in the renewal a new year or an entire new decade brings makes it just real enough to write a quick column about the 2010s being over and how that can be contextualized around the Chiefs.
The 2010s, like nearly every decade for the Chiefs, has been an abysmal roller coaster of high hopes ending in disaster. It started with a Matt Cassel-led team somehow winning the AFC West only to have the Baltimore Ravens beat the brakes off them in the Wild Card round, and it will end with a Patrick Mahomes-led team expectedly winning the AFC West. And would you look at that? The Ravens will be waiting to kick off the ’20s.
In between the Cassel-led Chiefs and the Mahomes-led Chiefs, K.C. saw two of their darkest years in 2011 and 2012 followed by a whole lot of hope in the arrival of Andy Reid and Alex Smith. None of that hope produced a Super Bowl, however. Instead it produced multiple new chapters in the Chiefs’ ever-expanding book of playoff heartbreaks. I don’t need to cover the details; we all know what happened. Even Mahomes got to add his own chapter in January of this year. It’s a rite of passage for a Chiefs quarterback at this point.
It already feels like the ’10s will be remembered mostly as pain for Chiefs fans. They won a whole lot—only two losing seasons in the entire decade!—but experienced increasingly inexplicable ways to lose playoff games. The Chiefs of the ’10s made the Chiefs of the ’90s look like amateur heartbreakers.
K.C.’s masterwork of perpetually building you up only to crush your soul is almost impressive if you stand back and look—as if it’s a depressing painting sitting alone on the wall of a stark, industrial gallery. “Oh, no,” you say, staring into the abstract portrayal of unceasing anguish. “It’s me.”
But with January comes the Chiefs’ latest and best opportunity to write a new chapter in their other playoff book. It’s the old dusty one in the attic that’s only a few pages long and hasn’t been cracked open in 50 years.
The Chiefs have been a perpetual cycle of having either a great offense and a terrible defense or the opposite. Save for a few years sprinkled in where there were flat awful across the board, this has remained true for five decades. But 2019 is a little different. They’ve got a great offense that has the capability to be all-world at any time, and a defense that’s not just competent, not just above average, but very good. The defense has flashes of greatness, even! This is unprecedented territory for K.C. They’ve even recruited one of the Ravens who helped beat the brakes off them in 2010 to bolster the defense for a Super Bowl run. It just feels like it’s all coming together.
This team is primed to take over the AFC throughout the ’20s. They’ve got the quarterback, the system, and the structure that says they should be built for long-term success. That means Super Bowls—plural. That means being the Cowboys of the ’90s, the Patriots of the ’00s, and the (sigh) Patriots again of the ’10s. This team should be the team of the ’20s.
Once the regular season is over and the clock hits midnight on New Years Eve, consider the flip to January a figurative burial of the Chiefs’ decade of misery. Further still, a burial of their half-century of just not being quite good enough. The ’20s should be special for the Chiefs; fittingly roaring and something actually worth remembering come 2030.