Chiefs Fans are Scared of a Past That Isn't Coming Back
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Chiefs haven’t been great this season. They’ve been pretty far from even good. Actually, they’ve had stretches of being straight-up bad.
The cause depends on who you ask. The national media will tell you Patrick Mahomes is “broken” or has been “figured out” by the rest of the league. Ask Chiefs fans, and when they’re not busy getting in fights with members of the Chiefs’ defense on Twitter, you’ll hear them calling for the jobs of some combination of various members of the coaching staff and Daniel Sorensen.
Obviously, most of the Mahomes stuff is the product of the borderline 24/7 sports talk cycle. A player as unquestionably great as Mahomes goes through a slump and what should be treated with a shrug and an “eh, he’ll figure it out” has every sports talk host treating the last three full years as a mirage and the last four games as reality. This behavior isn’t unique to Mahomes and should mostly be ignored.
Chiefs fans, especially on Twitter, have mostly been in a state of nuclear meltdown for the last five or so weeks. It’s as if they’ve collectively unhinged their jaws and are spinning around releasing corrosive acid, except in the form of furious taps on display glass echoing throughout Kansas City.
A casual scroll through Twitter on any gameday will find a universe of befuddled and furious Chiefs fans looking for anyone and everyone to blame for the team sputtering along seemingly haplessly. Sorensen, Steve Spagnuolo, Andy Reid, the ghost of a third wide receiver and Mahomes’ endorsement deals have all been under the microscope of fans all season.
And, hey, I get it. I traveled over 500 miles and spent over $500 to sit in the 38th row of the top section of Arrowhead so I could see the Chiefs in person for the first time in 18 years only for them to reward my willingness to sit in the cold, endless rain by getting slapped around by the Bills. This season hasn’t felt good so far.
But I’d venture as far to guess Buccaneers fans weren’t burning down their fanbase from the inside out this time last season when Tampa Tom and the pirate boys looked lightyears away from the team that would eventually thoroughly embarrass the Chiefs in the Super Bowl.
This is most likely why Tyrann Mathieu called the fanbase "toxic." There’s a certain level of direct negativity that does nobody any good that Chiefs fans seem to enjoy hitting like a Jeopardy! buzzer. Mathieu knows the defense has been bad. The team knows 5-4 isn’t where they’re supposed to be. Getting digitally screamed at about it on loop for months isn’t going to make the bad play stop. It’s only going to make players wonder if these are the same people they were playing for when they won the Super Bowl, then what will it take to get an ounce of a break when the team hits a slump?
And, yes, Mathieu could just delete Twitter and stay off social media and it’d probably make his life a whole lot better. But getting out of the cesspool doesn’t change that the cesspool is, indeed, a cesspool.
Chiefs fans think they’re holding players to a standard, but they’re really just panicking. They’ve finally had a taste of the kind of excellence the Chiefs were only ever good enough to lose to, and they’re terrified of returning to that sort of just-good-enough to not be good enough. A lot of this season, the Chiefs have looked like those teams of the past. It can feel like the last three years were just a dream and you’re only now waking up to the reality that Chiefs are, as always, still the Chiefs.
How many times were the Patriots declared dead only to break everyone’s hearts and end up back in the Super Bowl? How many times do the mid-season favorites end up doing anything in the playoffs? Most importantly, right now in 2021, is the AFC even any good? The teams that beat the Chiefs are losing to the Jets and the Dolphins. The Chiefs couldn’t lose to the Jets and Dolphins even if they actively tried.
Now, I could be wrong and the Chiefs could get boat raced by the Raiders and Cowboys and then come back from the bye and spin out into last place in the AFC West and never find their way back to the top again.
I could be wrong and Patrick Mahomes could be irreparably broken and spend the next 10 years being a half-a-billion dollar flashy disaster waiting to happen.
But I'm not wrong. It seems pretty reasonable to assert the last three seasons have been the true Chiefs and these last few weeks have been unfun but mostly not real. We’re gonna wake up in January and once again be watching the Chiefs blaze a path to February.
In the Reid era, this team has been been in bigger holes with less talent and still managed to pull a playoff appearance out of thin air. In his first season in Kansas City, Reid added Alex Smith to a 2-14 team and took them to the postseason. It’s not that bad. As long as Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid are in KC it’ll never be hopelessly bad again.
