Travis Kelce, David Long, and a troll job for Titans vs Chiefs

In 2021 in Nashville, the Titans wiped the floor with the Chiefs by a final score of 27-3, dropping KC to 3-4 on the season while Tennessee surged to 5-2. Here’s a little tidbit you might have missed amid the misery of that day. 

Ok, now that the trade deadline passed, is it cool for us to talk about the Titans game? Great.

The 5-2 Kansas City Chiefs will come off of their bye week on Sunday night at Arrowhead Stadium against the somehow also 5-2 Tennessee Titans. Full transparency, I was not aware the Titans were 5-2 until I started writing this, so forgive me for being blatantly naive. Tennessee rides into Kansas City on a five-game winning streak, so technically hot, but also have the albatross around their neck of what happened the last time they were in Arrowhead.

You remember that, right? Tennessee was up 10-0, then 17-7 before the undeniable force that was 2019 Playoff Mahomes took center stage in the AFC Championship game. That was then, this is now. The two teams that will be taking the field on Sunday have some familiar faces, but many have changed. The Chiefs will trot out Mahomes obviously along with Travis Kelce, Chris Jones, Frank Clark, and a number of other players that are still around from the 2019 Super Bowl championship squad. The Titans, of course, will be led by Derrick Henry who, among others, was also there in 2019 when the Titans gave away the chance to make their second Super Bowl appearance in franchise history.

But do you know who else was there for the Titans in 2019? While he was playing an insignificant role for the team in the AFC Championship game that year, a guy named David Long has started getting more snaps for the Titans since. He’s actually having a career year in Nashville so far in 2022. He leads the Titans in tackles with 53 and interceptions with 2. He’s developed into a nice inside linebacker to complement Zach Cunningham. But bless his heart, David Long definitely isn’t the most intelligent guy on the planet. You might be wondering why, and I’ll get to that.

But first, to recap, we’ve talked a lot about the last time the Titans visited Arrowhead – but what about the last time these two teams played in a regular season game? I’m going to drag you along on a depressing trip down memory lane and remind you about the Chiefs’ absolute meltdown in Week 7 of 2021. That 27-3 loss had me questioning everything. Are the Chiefs done or finished? Did Super Bowl 55 ruin Mahomes? Does Chris Jones even care about football anymore? What’s even real, do we even really exist?

Maybe not that deep but I, along with others, questioned the present and the future of Chiefs Kingdom. It certainly appeared at that point like the glory days had come and gone. Like there was really nothing to look forward to anymore. We were 3-4 and the blueprint was out on how to stop Mahomes and the once-deadly Chiefs offensive attack. The Titans were absolutely blowing the doors off of the Chiefs two weeks after Josh Allen and Buffalo had come into Arrowhead and also taken their turn at demolishing the once proud Chiefs.

This is all obviously extremely dramatic hyperbole – anyone with a brain understands that as long as the Chiefs have Patrick Mahomes they will be a contender. But the loss to the Titans was something we’d never really seen in Chiefs season A.P (after Patrick).

In fact, in the third quarter of that game, the Chiefs were getting blanked 27-0. And while it wouldn’t get much better, frustrations were certainly boiling up for the Chiefs players on the field at this point. To anyone casually observing the game from home, it certainly looked like Travis Kelce was getting mugged all afternoon long at the line of scrimmage as well as en route. Now, here’s where this comes full circle with David Long.

With a little over 11 minutes to play in the third quarter of this forgettable trash heap of a game, Travis Kelce sought justice—at very least an explanation—from an official in a very animated way.

Long decided it would be a good idea to mock Zeus. I’ll give him credit, it was a pretty hilarious troll job. I bet he’s pretty good at the Griddy and most Fortnite dances. But when I see this played back I just have to wonder if he had a solid grasp on exactly who he was trolling. Not just Kelce, but the guy who was throwing him the ball.

It’s probably nothing, and the Chiefs have probably long forgotten about this moment. Especially when you consider they won 9 of the following 10 games they played to finish the regular season 12-5, hosting their fourth consecutive AFC Championship game while the Titans suffered another disappointing early playoff exit after gaining the AFC’s 1 seed. But Patrick Mahomes has made it clear that he does, in fact, keep tabs on things like this. It would be a shame for David Long if he unlocked the fury of Petty Pat on Sunday and recreated a scene that looks a lot more like 2019 than it does 2021 for him and his Titans teammates.