Root, Root, Root For The Home Team…

I Love The Kansas City Chiefs!

I write under an alias, which carries its own internet baggage. Who am I? I’m Chief-Blinders-On—CBO. A delusional Chiefs fan who writes for free because I love this team, and I love my fellow fanatics.

Nevertheless, always the MOAR.

I love the Chiefs, and I miss when being a Kansas City Chiefs fan meant something more than just spending money, sweating PFF grades, managing fantasy football squads or tracking gambling payouts.

AG, I’m talking about the best tailgating in the world. The smoke rising off the asphalt in the Truman Sports Complex before noon, handing a stranger a plate, and sharing a bond that doesn’t exist anywhere else on earth.

We are generational fans of all shapes and sizes, beginnings, middle and endings. Our grandparents stood in the wind at Municipal Stadium. We have all frozen our asses off in Arrowhead (or dreamt about it), and we pass that down like an inheritance. I remember freezing with my oldest son against Pittsburgh in the Playoffs and that long walk to the car trying to encourage him that life wasn’t over—it was the ultimate perspective for someone that lives and dies with the Chiefs. It still hurts and makes me smile.

Think about your individual journeys, remember about the fans who stood with you on every single miserable, freezing Sunday for decades (inside and outside of Arrowhead)—the ones who spent their entire lives living and dying with this team, and never made it to February 2020. They almost endured the fifty-year drought after Super Bowl IV and didn’t survive to see Patrick Mahomes break the curse against the 49ers as San Francisco was pre-celebrating our downfall. Remember!

What would it have meant to them to see this run? Five Super Bowls in seven years. Three rings. An absolute golden age.

Now look at what we’re watching right now in these trying times after an undefeated 5-0 start. Sure we lost a couple of games including a shit-show to The Broncos in Denver. Yet, we have a rookie running back in Emmett Johnson running with genuine grit and exceptional talent to go along with the amazing Kenneth Walker III—K9. We’ve all waited for lockdown cornerbacks like Mansoor Delane and Nohl Williams probably since Dale Carter and James Hasty were locking down the boundary in the nineties.

And remember how much we loved the guys who weren’t Hall of Famers? Morten Andersen kicking in red—beloved. Louie Aguiar booming punts and tackling unsuspecting returners—boom cat painting. Greg Wesley laying wood. Eric Warfield battling on the outside. Priest Holmes finding the cutback and diving for TDs like Marcus Allen, and Johnnie Morton doing the worm in the end zone. JJ Birden stretching the field. Dave Krieg coming in to quarterback this team after Derrick Thomas almost killed him with seven sacks two years earlier—for safety. Barry Word grinding out four magical yards. Christian Okoye running over defenses as the Nigerian Nightmare. Dan Saleaumua plugging the A-gap. Dante Hall making entire coverage units look stupid in open space. The memories are in no particular timeline order but they’re all Chiefs! And they’re our Chiefs!

They weren’t all flawless PFF grades and they didn’t win every single Sunday. But we loved them unconditionally with fanatical conditions. It’s football!

Look at Dick Vermeil’s offensive line: Willie Roaf, Brian Waters, Casey Wiegmann, Will Shields, John Tait. The greatest front five to ever lace them up. Were Vermeil’s wide receivers elite? Hell no. Was the show amazing every single Sunday? You’re damn right it was. We loved every second of it.

And look, there is always room for hate. Fire Scott Pioli banners led to Reid. We hated Greg Robinson. We’ve all wanted to fire a coordinator (Bob Sutton hate led to Spags!), bench a kicker (or fire them into the Sun), or trade a guy after a bad drive.

That comes with the territory of caring and we all love the Chiefs. But hate doesn’t have to be all-encompassing. It doesn’t have to be the only thing we know how to do. If you desperately search for misery, you’re always going to find it.

When you go to training camp in August, you line up against the fence. You want the autographs, the selfies, and the handshakes from young men putting their bodies through a meat grinder. Then October-November hits, the team drops two games, and suddenly those same players are tossed aside cleanly as washed garbage and cooked trash. If people stood outside our jobs when we were twenty-two years old and publicly dragged us the way we drag these kids, none of us would have walked out the front door the next morning.

The big platforms online and prominent accounts across the Internet toss around outrage like play-doh forming ridiculous hot taeks. They stir the pot, smaller accounts sharpen it into hilarious memes, and the bots and trolls flood the zone to make a five-alarm fire out of a 5–2 football team.

Fire Andy Reid? Really?

You want Romeo Crennel back? How about Todd Haley? Remember when he said he could take twenty-two guys off the street and win, and then promptly won four games? You want Herm Edwards playing to win the game? Dick Vermeil with a track-meet offense and zero defense? Gunther Cunningham with a brick-wall defense and zero offense? We lived through the coaching search wilderness. We tragically lost Derrick Thomas. We gave away Marty Schottenheimer and Tony Gonzalez. We swallowed fifty years of heartbreak before this historic run began.

There is not another Andy Reid walking through that door saying, “Time’s Yours.” This isn’t the Scott Pioli situation…

Andy Reid isn’t going to win every single game. Harrison Butker isn’t going to nail every kick. Patrick Mahomes isn’t going to be MVP every Sunday. But the Chiefs are still the Chiefs, and they need a fanbase that remembers what it means to actually be the loudest and the proudest. That’s what I tell my kids: we are the loudest and proudest fans in the world.

Not the most entitled and impatient fans in the world. The loudest and proudest fans in the world! Red and Gold, baby!

Chhhhhiiiiiieeeeefffffffsssssss!!!

When my oldest son was a baby, I held him on my leg and taught him the tomahawk chop after we drafted Derrick Johnson when he was a few days old. Well before that, I fell in love with this team when I was ten years old sitting in Arrowhead Stadium, and I will love them until the day I die.

There’s an old line from the ballpark: “root, root, root for the home team, if they don’t win it’s a shame.”

That’s it. That’s the entire deal. It’s okay to care. It’s okay to stand by your team when it’s ugly. Go Chiefs.

That still means something. What does it mean to you?