Regular Season Wins Against the Chiefs are Lesser Teams' Super Bowls
Well, that sucked.
Of course the Kansas City Chiefs weren’t going to go undefeated. They had to lose to someone. But the Raiders? Really? It had to be them? I’d have been perfectly content with losing to the Bills and then some bogus Dolphins Fitzmagic or the last game of the season against the Chargers after the first-round bye was already wrapped up.
This embarrassing loss did, however, end up highlighting something about the Chiefs that finally puts them on the opposite side of a story they’ve lived for decades.
Let me preface this by saying the loss to the Raiders was both gross and bad. It should never have happened. Everything about it ruined my weekend. In fact, I’m still miserable about it, and I won’t stop being miserable until the Chiefs win again.
But the sheer jubilation from Raiders fans (and, apparently, the Raiders themselves) upon winning a Week 5 regular season game shows just how much the Chiefs’ lesser opponents see their games against Kansas City as the most important ones on their schedule, and the absolute pinnacle of their seasons. Particularly within the division, beating the Chiefs in the regular season may as well be winning the Super Bowl.
It wasn’t that long ago when Chiefs fans were in that exact same spot.
Every time the Chiefs beat the New England Patriots in the regular season, we celebrated like it meant something. All those wins amounted to were moments only Chiefs fans found any significance in. It was all hollow.
Remember 2014, when the Chiefs beat both the Seahawks and Patriots but didn’t make the playoffs? I was among those fans who’d be so quick to remind his friends that “Ya know, the Chiefs actually beat both of the Super Bowl teams this year.” No one cared. I was the only one in the room who gave a rip that my goober team that couldn’t win anything that mattered beat the teams that could.
And that’s where the Raiders are right now. That’s where every AFC team that isn’t the Ravens and maybe the Steelers is right now. If and when the Chiefs win the Super Bowl this year, Raiders Twitter and whoever else beats the Chiefs this season will cling to their win the same way Chiefs fans did for so long when they’d beat the future champions.
We’d cling to those victories over the Patriots and Seahawks for the same reason Raiders fans are going to cling to this win against the Chiefs. It let us believe that the Chiefs were secretly just as good as the teams that win Super Bowls. But they weren’t, just like the Raiders aren’t.
For the Chiefs themselves, this loss doesn’t matter much. Last year’s Chiefs lost to the Colts. The 2018 Patriots lost to the Jaguars, Lions, and Dolphins. Both teams won a Super Bowl. This year, the Chiefs already have beaten the Ravens, so they hold that tiebreaker over their biggest potential rival for a first-round bye.
Let the teams and their fans who won’t reach the Chiefs’ heights have their victory laps. It’s OK. We took plenty of them in the past. It’s one of the never-ending cycles of sports. When the Davids of the world get their taste of beating a Goliath, of course the Davids are going to revel in it. It’s a rare, fleeting moment of reprieve from the boundless fog of mediocrity.
The Chiefs spent five decades meandering through that same fog. Today, they’ve finally found their way out of it. In the future, while the Chiefs hold up trophies, teams still trapped in the fog will say “Yeah, but we beat you in October once.”
