Does a Super Bowl appearance or win forgive a bad contract for K.C. Chiefs?

If you want to build a championship roster in the NFL, then one thing you’re almost certainly going to have to do is spend big money to acquire players through free agency or trade that will hopefully get your team over the hump at one point or another. However, sometimes teams give players more money than they probably deserve in the heat of the moment because they’re so determined to add talent and add it sooner rather than later.

When teams do this, it can either end up paying off or it could end up hindering the team for years to come. In the case of the K.C. Chiefs, they were able to win a Super Bowl despite paying big bucks to players like Anthony Hitchens, Sammy Watkins, Frank Clark, etc. and those three just mentioned are who most fans think of when you ask them who on the Chiefs has/had a bad contract. Sure those players have come on at different points, but they haven’t been consistently elite. Regardless, does a Super Bowl win—or even an appearance—excuse a bad contract by a team?

Unfortunately, It’s more complicated than a simple yes or no.

Chiefs fans can easily attest to this question now because they’ve seen their team now fall short while getting so close in both 2018 and 2020. In each of those seasons, you can point to a big-money player who failed to deliver to the contract’s value. Anthony Hitchens and Sammy Watkins were among the highest-paid at their positions when Kansas City first signed them before the 2018  season and we all know how that year ended. The following offseason the Chiefs paid Frank Clark over $100 million to help shore up the defense in hopes of winning a Super Bowl and the Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV.

Does a Super Bowl win gloss over a team’s bad contracts?

So that answers the question, right? Because the team got a championship out of it, the contracts shouldn’t matter? Well, it depends on if you’re a fan of immediate certainty or competitive longevity. Would you rather your team go all in when you know they can win a Super Bowl or would you play it safer so you can compete for multiple Super Bowls over a span of time?

Most fans don’t care how the money is distributed as long as the team wins a Super Bowl. For Chiefs fans, most of them are already happy because they got to witness Super Bowl LIV. It’s not the same for everybody, though. If you’re someone who expects more out of the team (and you should), then you’re probably pretty frustrated at some of the poor contracts because they hinder the team’s financial flexibility going forward.

For example, this year the Chiefs did not win the Super Bowl and Watkins, Hitchens, and Clark were all due significant amounts of money this past season. With that being the case, it’s fair to say that if these funds were spread out in a way where the Chiefs could have addressed other weaknesses—like offensive line, linebacker, etc.—then you can quite literally make an argument that those contracts cost the team a Super Bowl.

Yes, those same players won in 2019, but they also lost in 2020 and take up a large chunk of the Chiefs’ cap space while doing so. Besides, those players aren’t just signed for one winning year. They’re signed for several years at a time and are expected to deliver their worth every season. Do you think the Chiefs signed Patrick Mahomes to a 10-year extension with the hope of only winning one or two Super Bowls?

We also need to separate what it means to make a Super Bowl compared to actually winning. Personally, I’m in the boat with those who say “If you’re not first, you’re last”. A bad contract definitely isn’t forgiven if you only make a Super Bowl, just like we mentioned earlier with 2019 vs. 2020 for the Chiefs. It’s easier for Chiefs fans to say the contracts are forgiven since they already won one, but how do you think L.A. Rams fans feel after making it in 2018 and then dishing out a bunch of money to Jared Goff, Todd Gurley beforehand, and then Jalen Ramsey and others only to never make it back again? It can be pretty frustrating for a fan.

Nevertheless, it really just depends on what satisfies you as a fan. If you really don’t care who gets paid what as long as the team still accomplishes what you expect then great, but some of us would like to keep winning and keep winning big. With the Chiefs specifically, you have Patrick Mahomes, Tyreek Hill, Travis Kelce, Tyrann Mathieu etc. and fans know that anything short of a Super Bowl is a disappointment. With the team currently forced to make room for a decreased cap, the pressure is on players with large contracts to deliver what their large cap hit calls for.