Katy Jackson, a 29-year-old Kansas City native, spent more than a year in quarantine, afraid to catch coronavirus and pass it on to her ailing mother. As days in isolation became weeks and the weeks became months, Jackson relied on the Chiefs as a form of remedy.
Shortly into a season dubbed “Run it Back,” she began a scrapbook by the same title, printing out Chiefs articles and gluing them to decorative pages. Inside the book, the final week of the season remained blank for a month — it was March before she finally sat at the kitchen countertop and completed the project.
“There are some articles,” she said, “that I still wish weren’t in there.”
After the Chiefs spent 50 years mostly immaterial in the national pro football conversation, a transcendent quarterback positioned them on the doorstep of a second straight Super Bowl — and as the NFL’s next dynasty.
Instead, they ignited a blaze they’re still trying to extinguish.
During the week of the Super Bowl, head coach Andy Reid’s son crashed his pickup truck near Arrowhead Stadium while allegedly driving drunk, leaving a 5-year-old girl with brain damage. The Chiefs were humiliated in the sport’s biggest game three days later with 97 million people watching. In the offseason, Pro Bowl defensive end Frank Clark was arrested on a gun charge and could face other charges stemming from a separate arrest after he allegedly traveled with an Uzi in his vehicle.
For nearly two years, the Chiefs had stood atop the NFL’s summit. On the field, they could do little wrong. Their fall came in remarkable and stunning fashion — so abruptly that by halftime of the Super Bowl, he would later quip, general manager Brett Veach began sketching a blueprint for rebuilding the team.
Next Friday, the Chiefs will emerge from the Arrowhead Stadium tunnel for the first time since winning the AFC Championship Game there last January. But they are still trying to escape a Super Bowl week that damaged their ego and image.
“I think everybody has still got a bad taste in our mouth on how we finished the season last year,” All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce said. “That’s fueling the fire.”
Still, consequential questions follow.
Will the focus of the Chiefs’ offseason roster moves — a new offensive line firewall to protect the NFL’s highest-paid quarterback — be enough?
Can they put the shame of Super Bowl week and monthslong criticism behind them to get back on top — something only one NFL team has achieved in the past half century?
And will the organization answer any questions — which its leaders have thus far evaded, citing an ongoing criminal case — about whether Britt Reid, the coach’s son and a linebackers coach at the time, was drinking at the team facility before crashing his vehicle less than a mile away?
The Chiefs are eager to keep the conversation on football. They have yearned to move on from the past seven months with their 2021 regular season opener, Sept. 12 against the Browns at Arrowhead Stadium.
’WE’LL BE BACK’
Minutes after the Super Bowl defeat, hamstrung from a turf toe injury that would require surgery, Patrick Mahomes walked through the locker room in Tampa Bay. In an honest moment, he’ll tell you the loss will always bother him. And those close to him will tell you it stimulated his summer.
But first, in the postgame locker room, he implemented a strategy he would carry the length of the offseason.
“We’ll be back,” he said to a couple of teammates that night.
In the previous year, the Chiefs had ended a 50-year championship drought and transformed the hope of a fan base that once had so little of it. They’d ignored halftime deficits, relentless pass rushes and the ghosts of a franchise past. At one point, Mahomes’ kneecap dislocated so jarringly that teammates needed to turn away, and still that couldn’t derail the momentum or his stardom.
But the 31-9 loss to the Buccaneers presented a new form of adversity. Mahomes had never lost that bad, particularly on that stage. On a night in which he intended to grab the proverbial torch from Tom Brady, Mahomes failed to get his team into the end zone even once.
“That part hurts a lot,” he would later say.
Immediately, his walk through the locker room sought to shape the response. His biggest move — one designed to lure his teammates to follow — would come months later. During an interview at a golf tournament, asked if he had any records in sight, he mentioned just one.
“Yeah,” he quickly responded, “The only record I have my eyes set on breaking, which would be new this year, would be going 20-0.”
Push aside, for a moment, that NFL history includes only one undefeated season, and that’s when the schedule comprised three fewer games.
Beyond that, among the past 27 teams coming off a Super Bowl loss, 10 finished with a losing record the following season. Only one team since 1972 has actually turned a Super Bowl defeat into enough motivation to win it the following year — the 2018 New England Patriots.
One.
In 48 years.
But a distinct resolve has tracked Mahomes since childhood, as natural as it is intentional, one that is not deterred by the details of the past. Even his own. The characteristic traces back to Whitehouse High School in Texas, when on the bus ride home after losing his final football game, he asked the basketball coach if he could play in the game the following day.
Mahomes would call the Super Bowl “the worst that I think I’ve been beaten in a long time,” before he made a point to learn something valuable from it, not dwell on it. Throughout last season, the Chiefs had trailed in games they probably should’ve lost, only to find someway, somehow to win late. He’d played with an invincibility. Maybe he got too comfortable in that role, he thought. In Tampa, he looked, well, human.
One more thing, too. He re-watched the game only twice, but it crystallized an on-field adjustment he’d spend training camp stressing. As the onslaught of pass rushers took over, he too anxiously left the pocket on some plays, anticipating a rush rather than reacting to one.
“That’s something I’ve been working on,” he said.
After the Super Bowl, he would fade from the public setting, as surgery on his turf toe injury put him in a walking boot. Behind the scenes, though, he began working out with his longtime trainer, Bobby Stroupe. He’d allow the toe rehab to alter his workouts, not halt them.
“There’s no doubt he was motivated,” Stroupe said. “I’ve seen it. There was a little less joking around. He’s never been silly or anything like that, but I would say the word that kind of sums it up for me this offseason is intent. He was intent with everything that he did and laser focused.”
Stroupe instructed Mahomes to take a couple extra vacations this offseason. Mahomes took those trips, as advised, but he requested Stroupe provide him with workout material. On occasion, he went a step further, asking Stroupe to travel with him.
By spring, his focus had been set squarely on 2021, and the 20-0 remark had been an attempt to bring his teammates along for that ride. The quote, as you can imagine, caught internet fire and before long, Mahomes’ coach was attempting to downplay the remark’s significance. But a couple of teammates took an opposite approach. They backed it up.
“We’re going to go into this season and try to win every single football game, whether home or away,” Kelce said.
“We gotta look for the future, and the future is what Patrick Mahomes said, which is 20-0,” wide receiver Tyreek Hill said.
Mahomes’ message had found its intended landing spot. His own team.
“I think guys hear it,” Mahomes said. “And they understand it.”
He knew, he would later explain, getting back to another Super Bowl would be about more than football.
QUESTIONS LINGER OFF THE FIELD
The backdrop for the Chiefs’ dour offseason began before they played a down in the Super Bowl.
Two days ahead of the team’s flight to Florida, Britt Reid drove his truck 83.9 miles per hour along an Interstate 435 entrance ramp with a serum blood alcohol content of .113, according to Jackson County prosecutors. And then Reid, a linebackers coach for his father, slammed his vehicle into two parked cars on the side of the highway, leaving Ariel Young, a 5-year-old girl, with a traumatic brain injury, prosecutors allege.
“This beautiful, innocent child and her family deserve the support of all Chiefs fans everywhere,” Annette Munson wrote on a GoFundMe page for Ariel’s medical expenses, which raised nearly $600,000.
Britt Reid faces a felony charge of driving while intoxicated, to which he’s pleaded not guilty. His trial date is expected to be set during a hearing next month. The Chiefs did not renew his contract after the season, ending his employment with the team — on a coaching staff with limited turnover, his absence represents a considerable change.
The organization has been scarce on the details preceding the wreck — the potential of litigation a possible explanation for the silence. Had Britt Reid been drinking at the team practice facility, where the NFL has instituted a policy prohibiting alcohol? If he had been drinking at the facility, had anyone been aware of it?
Seven months later, the questions linger.
“Ariel’s life is infinitely more valuable than any Chiefs win, even the Super Bowl,” Dominic Gassman wrote on the GoFundMe page two months later.
Some 72 hours after the wreck, the Chiefs played their worst football in three seasons. For Mahomes, it had been impossible to deny its presence in the game.
“Guys were still ready to go, but I mean it’s a very tragic situation. You know you want to keep that in the back of your minds,” Mahomes said. “You give prayers to the families that were involved, and especially the child that was involved. I don’t want to say it affected us on the field — I mean they beat us, there’s no excuses on that — but you’re definitely praying for those families.”
Upon walking to a microphone for his Super Bowl press conference, coach Andy Reid opened with a statement wishing Ariel’s family well. “My heart goes out to those involved,” he has said, declining questions “because of the legal situation.”
As an organization, the Chiefs’ statements have followed a similar pattern — emphasizing their thoughts are with Ariel’s family but omitting details on the circumstances that led to the crash.
“That isn’t good enough. Not for the Chiefs, not for the Hunt family that owns the team and not for the NFL,” wrote Dan Wetzel for Yahoo Sports.
The spotlight the Chiefs had basked in suddenly had a sharp glare.
“Chiefs, NFL still have tough questions to answer in Britt Reid case,” announced an NBC Sports story in April.
“Chiefs must be transparent about Britt Reid as he’s charged with DWI in crash that left a child with brain injuries,” read a USA Today piece.
They persisted throughout the summer. Frank Clark, a defensive end and the team’s highest paid player in 2021, was arrested twice in the offseason, and he’s been charged for felony possession of an assault weapon in the first incident.
In March, Clark and another man, Charles Smith, were arrested after officers observed and then recovered two loaded firearms inside their vehicle, according to California Highway Patrol Records. Three months later, after being pulled over for a vehicle code violation in Los Angeles, Clark was arrested for possession of a concealed firearm — a submachine gun — in the vehicle, according to the LAPD.
“Officers noticed a bag with an Uzi sticking out in plain sight in the car,” an LAPD spokesman said.
The Clark and Reid cases are both ongoing, both organizational bruises with court dates looming. NFL reviews will follow.
Even as the Chiefs divert attention to a new season.
‘FEELING LIKE ... THE WORST TEAM IN THE LEAGUE’
Inside a suite at Raymond James Stadium, Veach watched the Super Bowl in agony.
The Buccaneers were mauling a Kansas City makeshift offensive line — forcing Mahomes to turn an NFL game into backyard football. He scrambled the length of five fields over the course of the game.
“You left the Tampa Bay game feeling like you were the worst team in the league,” Veach told The Star. “I never thought our organization would accomplish something like that over the last two years and feel that way. But it didn’t sit well. It didn’t feel like we really accomplished anything.”
The Chiefs won 14 regular season games in 2020, most in franchise history. They won a fifth consecutive AFC West title, played in the AFC Championship Game a third consecutive season and reached the Super Bowl a second straight year.
But in the days after it ended short of a repeat, the front office and coaches would gather to answer a question that would frame the spring:
Should they build their 2020 roster remembering all they had accomplished? Or should they make sweeping changes based on a miserable ending?
The conversations landed somewhere in the middle, though Veach would acknowledge Tampa Bay’s punch to the gut didn’t leave his mind. He couldn’t fathom watching another game unfold that way.
The Chiefs created road maps and contingency plans for free agency and the draft, and although they entailed some variety, there was one constant. In some form or fashion, they would overhaul the protection of their most prized and expensive asset.
Mahomes had shouldered some of the blame for the Super Bowl outcome — and he’d raised his hand in the postgame press conference — but Veach pointed out his quarterback didn’t receive a lot of help that night. His receivers dropped passes, maybe at least two touchdowns. The scrambling had been made necessary by an injury-ravaged offensive line exposed on nearly every down.
So the Chiefs went after the best offensive linemen on the free agent market. They gave Joe Thuney the largest contract for a guard in NFL history. They acquired linemen with two of their six draft picks. And they traded a first-round pick, among other assets, for Baltimore left tackle Orlando Brown.
“I love what they’ve done,” said Trent Green, a CBS NFL game analyst and former Chiefs quarterback. “You shore up the offensive line the way that they did, they’re in great shape.”
“The Chiefs will have their best offense in the Mahomes era (thus far) if the newly-constructed OL plays as good as it looks on paper,” ESPN Monday Night Football analyst Louis Riddick said.
Clark’s legal situation is something the Chiefs will potentially have to navigate this season — the NFL will review the two arrests under its personal conduct policy.
Mahomes’ toe will be tested more harshly in actual games. Some wonder about the team’s cornerback depth.
But every team has something, and the Chiefs have fewer somethings than 31 other NFL teams. On the other side of a roster reconstruction, they open the season atop the Vegas sheet for Super Bowl favorites at 5-to-1. That’s better than a year earlier.
But that’s happened before.
And it doesn’t always end well.
A CAUTIONARY TALE
The best team in the NFL over the regular season won 14 games. In search of his second Super Bowl, an MVP quarterback paced the league’s best offense.
But they lost in the Super Bowl, a game few expected them to lose, outplayed by a Tom Brady-led opposition.
This isn’t a story of the 2020 Chiefs.
It’s the 2001 Rams.
And it’s a cautionary tale.
The Greatest Show on Turf, as the Rams were dubbed, transformed NFL offenses for years to come. They broke longstanding scoring records with a passing attack based on speed, motion, timing patterns and did we mention speed? The Greatest Show on Turf had been billed as having the potential for an annual tour after its first championship — same as these Chiefs — but left as a one-hit wonder. After the 2001 upset, the Rams brought back the core of their team. They entered the 2002 season as an overwhelming favorite for another Super Bowl. They’d bounce back, people thought.
They started the season 0-6.
“We went into the next year only thinking about that — we’re going to prove to everybody (the Super Bowl loss) was a fluke,” said Kurt Warner, quarterback of that Rams team, adding, “I think that’s going to be the key (for the Chiefs) — how the leaders of this team use the Super Bowl. Do you let it go? Do you put it in the past? Is there a way to use it as a positive reminder (that) we’re not there yet?”
If you’re looking for optimism — in search of a reason why the Chiefs can break the Super Bowl Loser Jinx — there’s one key difference. The Chiefs didn’t respond like a team that had been so close. They didn’t just tweak a couple of spots with minor upgrades.
They responded like a team in need of full repair. When they open the season on Sept. 12, they will have at least four new starters on that offensive line, and quite possibly all five.
The changes up front — coupled with the onset of a new season — provide renewed optimism for a fan base in search of it, a group that would similarly prefer to talk about football. In past eras, playoff disappointments could linger among a Chiefs fan base so accustomed to them.
Through the turmoil of the Super Bowl week and the negative press that continued into the offseason, “the buzz,” as team president Mark Donovan phrased it, has already returned.
They have Mahomes, they’ll say. His confidence has become their confidence.
On the Monday following the Super Bowl, Michelle Perkins and Arthur Brooks spent the morning taking down the party decorations from their Leavenworth home — Chiefs balloons, beads and a Mahomes jersey hanging on the wall.
But rather than stashing a jersey in his closet, Brooks pulled it over his shoulders and then walked out the front door.
He wore it to the barbershop that Monday.
“We lost one Super Bowl,” Brooks said. “We won the last one. And we still have a chance to come back this year. It’s gonna be OK, man.”
Joshua Young and his wife, Sidney, residents of Riverside, saw the Super Bowl in person last February. They booked the trip to Tampa the previous August — before the Chiefs had played a game — so confident they’d offer them the joy they’d experienced a year earlier.
Young left the stadium that evening to a crowd of Buccaneers fans tugging on his jersey and screaming taunts and obscenities in his direction.
But this month, he will log onto an airline website before scrolling through Airbnb options — all to secure tickets and lodging for a mid-February trip to Los Angeles.
The site of Super Bowl LVI.
