The Kansas City Chiefs are becoming the NFL's new villain — and it's going to be awesome
Everything is pro wrestling. I’ve said this for many years and I believe it to be the truth. The blend of soap-opera storytelling, tribalistic fandom and cartoonish violence that can suddenly turn brutally realistic just about fully encompasses the breadth of human existence. Pro wrestling, as an art form, has managed to boil down life on Earth to its essence and splatter it across a ring. The mat of a wrestling ring is, of course, covered in canvas. Canvas is a material artists use to do art. This metaphor is tracking beautifully.
So, everything is pro wrestling. There isn’t much across our entire social, political, or pop culture-consuming lives that we don’t frame as stories with clear babyfaces and heels. We participate as fans on the fringes, hoping the more we scream, the more likely the ending to the story will change.
Sports isn’t even just loosely pro wrestling. Pro sports are explosive pageantry; the focus on heightened storylines, the rockstar-like video packages and entrances, and even the existence of the Good Guy vs. Bad Guy morning show shouting matches that sound more like wrestling promos than debates. In part, the way sports are presented and covered today can be traced back to Dick Ebersol working with Vince McMahon on Saturday Night’s Main Event and WrestleMania in the 1980s before Ebersol took over NBC Sports in the 1990s.
Now that I’ve over-explained my premise and you’ve either bought in or been beaten into submission, what does this have to do with the Kansas City Chiefs?
In 2018, I wrote that the Chiefs were primed to be the NFL’s next great heel. After enjoying two seasons as the league’s top babyface, they’re finally on that precipice.
For the first time in two decades, the NFL doesn’t have a clear-cut top villain. For 20 years, the Patriots have been the greatest heel in sports history. But now that Brady and Gronk are in Tampa Bay, they don’t feel like villains anymore. If anything, it’s starting to feel like the rest of the NFL world is starting to root for them a little. At the very least, they didn’t immediately turn the Buccaneers into a hated franchise. Brady and Gronk are just a couple of cute old guys who are best buds and wanna play football.
The Patriots are still very much a villain, but they feel less like the unbeatable bad guy and more like the shriveled, old, dying remnants of a once-great power. Yeah, we hate them, but they can just be brushed aside now, so we’re not concerned with them. I’m aware those last two sentences set me up for great pain when the Patriots win Super Bowl 55 with Jarrett Stidham. I’m a Chiefs fan, I learned to enjoy pain long ago.
So the NFL is in a bit of a limbo as far as having a villainous titan to slay. They won’t be for long, though, because 2020 is the season the Chiefs turn into the heel they’ve been destined to be since the moment Patrick Mahomes was drafted.
As a fanbase, Chiefs Kingdom is a bit ahead of the team itself, though they do play a part in the heel-turn. The perception of the team is linked to the perception of its fans. The further Chiefs fans sink into the Twitter black hole of being simultaneously insufferably obsessive and smugly trollish and dismissive, the closer the team itself gets to being hated.
But it’s the Chiefs’ play on the field that will truly turn them to the dark side. The Chiefs aren’t just great, they’re generationally great. Barring injury-related disaster, they’re going to be great for a long, long, long time. People only enjoy greatness until it’s sustained greatness. Then you’re just the jackass who won’t let anyone else win.
The infectious fun of the offense and tough-guy persona of the defense both play just as well as villainous trademarks as they have as the calling cards of up-and-coming heroes. Tyreek Hill’s peace sign and Tyrann Mathieu’s unfiltered Twitter voice will morph from cool to despised as the Chiefs keep winning.
Mahomes has been compared to Michael Jordan, both in his play and in his status as a universally beloved icon of his sport. But Jordan couldn’t exist as the superhero he was in the 80s and 90s. We live in an all-access world now. It’s 24/7, 365.
If you wanted access to Jordan in 1996 and you didn’t have tickets to a Bulls game, you could get your daily glimpse of him in commercials or ESPN highlights. That was pretty much it. In 2020, if you want access to Mahomes, it’s there for you whenever you want it. Just follow him on Twitter or Instagram and in a day or two, you’ll know when and where he’s practicing, his workouts, his dogs’ favorite spots on the sofa, what movies he’s watching and what he eats for breakfast.
Social media humanizes our stars, but it also invariably leaves them oversaturated. There’s only so much of the Mahomes “aw, shucks” good-guy persona that will play until opposing fans turn on him too. Especially when juxtaposed against his hyper-confident style and persona on the field.
None of this is a bad thing, for the record. Every story needs a villain, and I’m excited for the Chiefs to become the NFL’s next top heel. I’m excited for everyone else to be sick of the Chiefs as they’re seemingly on national television every week. I’m excited for the Chiefs to be the impenetrable wall between every other team and greatness for the next decade.
It’s all pro wrestling. Let them boo. It just means the Chiefs are finally doing everything right.
