Kansas City Chiefs fans endure long, heartbreaking road to Super Bowl

The Entire 2012 Season

I thought being really good and then flopping in the playoffs was as bad as it could get as a fan. I was wrong. The 2012 season taught me that. I couldn’t believe just how low things could get. It was as dark of time as I can remember for any team in any sport that I’ve ever followed.

Yes, the Chiefs went 2-14 and were the worst team in the NFL. That’s bad, but that wasn’t even close to the worst part. The team was an absolute embarrassment. They weren’t competitive. The coaching staff was incompetent. The front office was unhealthy.

In Week 5, the home fans cheered during a 9-6 loss to the Baltimore Ravens when Kyle Orton came in for an injured Matt Cassel. The fans were so happy to see some kind of change to the offense that it came across that they were glad Cassel was hurt. This would have received enough bad press on its own, but after the game Eric Winston took the fans to task for it in a locker room rant that just added fuel to the fire. The Chiefs were not only a mess, but now the greatest fans in the world looked bad, too.

The divide between the team and the fans would only widen. Eventually fans would rally around the “Save Our Chiefs” movement, wearing black to games and even flying banners over the stadium demanding that general manager Scott Pioli be fired. This still wasn’t rock bottom though.

Tragically, the awful product on the field and the fractured relationship with the fans would all take a back seat to real tragedy when linebacker Jovan Belcher would commit suicide at the team’s facilities after killing his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins. Words simply can’t describe how low things were in Chiefs Kingdom. It was the only time I ever remember thinking, “I’m not getting any joy out of this anymore. Something has to change”.

Luckily, something did change. While I would never wish a season like that on any fan base, there was one good thing that came from it. Clark Hunt cleaned house after that season and the result was Andy Reid‘s arrival to Kansas City. His introduction was the beginning of this Super Bowl run. He would bring new life to a franchise in its darkest hour, and I will be forever grateful to him for that. You can see how much this team wants to get Reid his Super Bowl win. I think they want it for him more than they want it for themselves and that says something.

While Reid’s arrival was the start of the turnaround, the heartbreak wasn’t over yet for Chiefs fans.