Professionally Timely in K.C.

It’s an exciting day in Kansas City as the Chiefs get set to roll out their product tonight before the eyes of a nation hungry for pro football as defending champions of the NFL. Their win in what was the 2019 season, although they of course won their title in 2020, finished off a decade of sports in Kansas City where each of their major professional sports teams won a championship, and did so at just the right time.

Of course its always the right time to be crowned a champion, but each win provided a high point when the other teams had recently provided far less than that. The first title came in 2013 for Sporting Kansas City and it provides a caveat. Area sports were very thirsty for a winner as the Chiefs were only months removed from having the first pick in the draft, the reward for being the worst team in football, although by the time that Sporting won their title on a frozen December night, Andy Reid had begun the resuscitation of the franchise, which had finished last in the division four of the previous five years. The Royals had put their fans through two decades of torture at that point, although 2013 provided a winning record for the first time in ten years.

That 86-76 season in which the Royals finished third in the division and weren’t really part of the playoff race famously led Dayton Moore to say that it felt like they had won the title was merely an entree for the next two frenetic years as the Royals dominated the Kansas City sports consciousness. Each of the other two teams weren’t bad by any means, but for the Chiefs 2014 was the only year that Andy Reid has missed the playoffs here, and 2015 was another wild card year before the recent run of division titles. It would however provide the first playoff win in ages. Sporting KC in those seasons squeezed into the playoffs as a 5th and 6th place team and was knocked out in the first round of the playoffs. So by Kansas City standards, where we seem to have trouble getting all our teams rolling at the same time, it was actually pretty good.

It certainly didn’t seem on that glorious November night in 2015 when the Royals won the championship that merely five years down the road we would be where we are now. Which is with the Chiefs a heavy favorite to run it back as Super Bowl champions, while Sporting is coming off it’s first missed playoff in years, and the Royals having returned to the misery of yesteryear. No one really foresaw how rapidly the Royals would crash and burn, the landscape of MLS was only starting to shift toward larger market teams, and the Chiefs were shaping up as a nice team, but didn’t seem a title threat, being second fiddle in their own division to a Broncos team that a couple of months later would win the Super Bowl,

But here we sit now after two magical years of Patrick Mahomes at the helm with the Chiefs everyone’s darlings and rightly so. Their win last year made it three Kansas City championships in six years by the three separate franchises, but it certainly seems that if the next six years produced three titles it might well be more likely that the Chiefs would win them all than the varied previous run we had the privilege of experiencing. As I wrote in Tuesday's blog it is tough to summon up much optimism for the Royals, and while I have great faith that Peter Vermes and the outstanding Sporting organization will produce good results, it will be tough to battle the Atlanta’s and L.A.’s to get the biggest prize.

The NFL doesn’t have that situation, the playing field is level, and the way the paying field is set up right now with the quarterback being everything is just magic when you have the best one, and the best man to guide one. Prior to 2015 being a pro sports fans in Kansas City was bad business. It had been since the late 90’s that a title had come and that was by the Wizards, who weren’t nearly as relevant as Sporting is today, and before that 1985 with the Royals. Now we can sit back and watch the Chiefs be a viable threat for at least a decade, and the other franchises can work kind of pressure free.

And tonight the Chiefs start their work with a championship already in their pocket, and I think that freedom is going to provide fuel, not complacency. It should be a mighty fun ride…..for quite a while.