Got this text from poscast contributor Daniel at 6:24 last night:
“So we lose a spot or 2 in the draft but spank the donkeys @ mile high & crush their hopes of making the playoffs. I’ll take it.”
I concur, with several “fuck”s and “yeah”s sprinkled in, though I my mass “Horray Chiefs!” text would have gone something like:
“So we lose a spot or 2 in the draft but avoid Whitlock whining about Scott Pioli and Todd Haley for at least another week. I’ll take it.”*
* In fact, if you were following @BWetherJohnson or @KCSportsPodcast on Twitter (plug!!), you would have gotten it
And so ends the 50th season of Kansas City Chiefs football, a season that will be known primarily for three things:
1.) The Chiefs sucking
2.) Todd Haley being an asshole
3.) The Chiefs sucking
The reason for pointing out the texts/tweets at the beginning of the column is that it does feel good to go out a winner. Even if it was against a Denver team that was decidedly more putrid than what their record after six weeks looked like.
Looking at the analysis of the game from a Chiefs perspective at first put a damper on the good feelings that I had acquired while watching the game.
Final nine weeks:
BRONCOS:
Record: 2-7
Off yards: 330
Def yards: 339
CHIEFS:
Record 3-6
Off yards: 392
Def Yards: 341
At first glance, I thought, “Oh…well, that’s not so impressive. The Broncos were at least as bad, if not worse than us. We should have won the game.”
Then…well, wait a minute…did I just say??
That’s right, we should have won the game. In this historically awful season of retartedly putrid football, the Chiefs were actually (or at least should have been) favored to win a game…and they actually pulled together and did.
Early in the season, we were (well, me in particular) resigned to downplaying any significance of the Chief’s play due to the fact that they were playing with Carl Peterson and Herm Edwards’ collection of shit boxes. There wasn’t, I contended, any real way to determine the improvement of the players on this particular team due to the fact that most of them would be replaced by better players before the team turned the corner and actually started winning again.
Well, it looks like maybe the improvement was there after all, and there are some legitimate pieces to build on. That, coupled with a full slate of draft picks and an entire year of scouting under their belt, I would say what looked impossible for Haley and Pioli a few scant weeks ago might actually transpire: the Chiefs might actually compete before 2015.
Of course, feel free to bookmark this and send it to me after Haley is fired after starting next season 0-5 and Jack Harry is reporting he knifed a hobo under the Paseo Bridge.
There are no magical ways for a bad football team to get better overnight. The Chiefs still have a long, long road ahead of them, but if you would have asked me to pick any Chiefs team in the past nine years to go into Invesco Field (which opened in 2001) and beat a Broncos team that was playing for their playoff lives, this team would have been on the bottom of my list. And this team is the only Chiefs team to do that.
That, as they say, is why they play the games. And that, as they say, is why when you start using Chris Berman schtick, it’s time to end the column.
Jason Whitlock is fat!! Byesers!!
