When The Window Closes, It Slams Shut

One of the less-invoked-but-still-annoying features of following sports is the idea that the future can be foretold based on a typically stunted review of the recent past. For the Kansas City Chiefs, it had been a debate among our louder pundit-o-blatherers about the state of their dynasty—specifically whether their bay window of glory had been reduced to a peephole.

Then the gods weighed in with the answer, with the subtlety of a sash window being slammed down on Andy Reid's tongue. And yes, we cleaned up that image in deference to the season.

In short, they're as done as they've been since Herm Edwards was the coach, and the unthinkable end of the good times is now very thinkable indeed.

The Chiefs have had by any measure a lousy season. They were older and slower and less healthy and less resilient in a game's biggest moments, and then Patrick Mahomes's power of invulnerability betrayed him two weeks ago. But still the hopefuls hoped, not for this year mind you but for 2026 and beyond. Dynasties die last in the minds of those who attach themselves to the dynasty like barnacles. Mahomes would rise again, and Travis Kelce would be replaced by a younger and more dynamic tight end, and the secondary would defend better, and Chris Jones would live forever, and Reid would trade Harrison Butker for a younger, more Brandon Aubrey-ish kicker, and they would go back to pulling horseshoes from their nethers seemingly every week. And for you conspiracy weirdos, they'd get the NFL office back on the payroll through the power of Swift. It would all get better, because nothing's dead until the coroner's called.

Then the gods reasserted their central prerogative, which is to remind everyone who runs the windows—when they open and when they close. Unsatisfied that the previous messages—losing to the ever-frustrating Chargers, Mahomes's knee crumpled, losing late to someone else's kicker, and eliminated from their first postseason in a decade—were being received clearly, they doubled down on the message, to wit:

• Losing to the clinically horrendous Tennessee Titans, 26-9, their worst performance against a bad team since the Christmas gimme to the Raiders two years ago.
• Kareem Hunt getting tackled for a safety.
• Gardner Minshew, Mahomes's replacement, injuring his knee on the Chiefs' first drive and eventually being replaced by the deeply anonymous Chris Oladokun, whose entire NFL history was one sack, one fumble, and one five-yard run.
• Gaining an absurd 133 yards, the second-lowest total in the 13-year Reid era behind only the last game of last year's regular season, when the Chiefs had already clinched their playoff position and sat Mahomes for Carson Wentz. That was also the Oladokun game.

It's not so much that they lost, or who they lost to, or that the game had any lingering meaning. It's more a matter of style, as though the galactic pixies were telling everyone that the Chiefs are like every other team: capable of being torn down below the studs-and-framing level if need be, just to make a point. Football is the most brutally existential of sports, the exultation of technology through analytics and precision through militarism. Its dynasties tend to run longer than other sports, but they do not jerk back and forth between dominance and irrelevance. Once you're in, you're in, and once you're out … well, they don't call it rebuilding for nothing.

The Browns of the '50s (yeah, that was a thing), the Packers of the '60s, the Steelers of the '70s, the 49ers of the '80s, the Cowboys of the '90s, the Patriots of the 2000s and 2010s and the Chiefs of the here and now—they all hit warp speed and held it for at least half a decade in the case of the Cowboys and a full decade in the other examples. There was none of that Warriors' 2015, '17, '18, and then '22 stuff.

And the Chiefs were that team, with a five-year runup with the underappreciated Alex Smith, then the Mahomes years—uninterrupted triumphs that defied the injury tables and the preposterous record (43-10) in one-score games in this decade. Even this year, when the one-score luck ran out, there was still the Mahomes worship that allegedly cured all other tactical and strategic ills. True belief is hard to extinguish.

But Sunday ought to have provided the attitudinal adjustment required of Chiefs fans. It was comprehensive and pointedly willful and even gratuitous in the case of Minshew, who wasn't even part of the glory years but a new and designed-to-be-unused backup in the proud tradition of Chad Henne and Blaine Gabbert and Carson Wentz. Now the Chiefs are going to be run, at least for the moment, by Oladokun, the pride of South Dakota State, and before that Samford, and before that South Florida.

Are the Chiefs actually doomed? Who the hell knows? But the message has been sent, and only fools choose not to heed it. As the bard explained it:

No one beats him at his game
For very long, but just the same
Who cares there's no place safe to hide?
Nowhere to run, no time to cry
So celebrate while you still can
'Cause any second, it may end
And when it's all been said and done
Better that you had some fun
Instead of hiding in your shell
Why make your life a living hell?
So drink a toast and down the cup
And drink to bones that turn to dust, 'cause
No one, no one, no one, no one
No one, no one, no one, no one
No one, no one, no one, no one
No one lives forever!