Some people are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. This 2020 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
Your team: Kansas City Chiefs.
Your 2019 record: 12-4. Super Bowl Champions. Came back from 10 or more points down in all three playoff games to win it all. Now that SOUNDS very impressive and heartwarming, but let’s note the teams those comebacks happened against:
•A headless Texans outfit led by blithering shithead
•A 9-7 Titans team that was no better than its record indicated
•A Niners team coached by trust fund baby who still has no idea how to run the ball to put a game away
The Chiefs didn’t have to beat Tom Brady or Lamar Jackson or Drew Brees or Aaron Rodgers or Russell Wilson to win it all. In the AFC, cupcake scheduling is handed down from one team to the next, like a precious heirloom. The Colts played the Jaguars 70 times a year during Peyton’s tenure. Tom Brady luxuriated for two decades in the absolute shittiest division in football. And now, Patrick Mahomes, it’s your turn. If you and the Chiefs’ fanbase think you earned credibility running that preseason-quality gauntlet to a title, you underestimate how willing I am to distort reality in the name of envy. I learned to hate the Warriors and I can learn to hate you.
Also, you barely beat the Lions, and the Colts beat the unholy piss out of you.
Your coach: Andy Reid, shown here cutting out the middle man and wearing the Cici’s pizza buffet sneeze guard outright.
More efficient that way. Andy got his little redemption tour thanks to that Super Bowl title. But trust me, he's still the same coach as before and he's still gonna make the same hilarious mistakes. When we get to January, it’s not gonna be Bill O’Brien on the opposite sideline gifting Andy punts. It’s gonna be an actual coach, and that’s when Andy will choke on a biscuit.
Your quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, who just signed a 45-year, multi-suite contract extension so intricate that somehow everyone involved got a raw deal out of it. All I know is that Mahomes better win six more titles during that contract, or else this fanbase will instantly start bitching that he’s lost it. The Chiefs have spent my entire life, and change, trying to draft their own franchise QB. Now they have one and he’s the most astonishing talent ever to play the position. You would think these fans would appreciate that fact after wandering across the Croyle Desert for so long. You would think.
Mahomes miraculously avoided tearing his knee to confetti last season after he got tangled up in a hogpile and the trainer had to pop his knee back into place. When Mahomes gets hurt for real this time around, your backup is Chad Henne and it’s 2011 all over again. And he will get hurt. I see Mike Remmers on your roster. I know a scheduled delivery of pain when I see it.
Mahomes also owns part of the Royals now. As an official MLB owner, his first job will be to complain that the Royals are spending too much of his money.
What’s new that sucks: Everyone got an extension. That includes Tyreek Hill, who can apparently outrun any accusation that he decapitates his own children. Elsewhere the Chiefs doled out lucrative extensions to Chris Jones, Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Reid and GM Brett Veach. It’s just like after the Eagles won a title and locked up their fabled “core” until 2064. Love to win myself into eternal roster inflexibility. This was a bottom-10 rushing defense a year ago which, on Thursday night, made the Texans’ trade for David Johnson look almost defensible. The Chiefs are also operating without both starting CBs because Bashaud Breeland is suspended and because Charvarius Ward just busted his hand. None of these deficiencies will bite them in the ass until the divisional playoffs. That’s when they’ll get to experience every bad thing that’s happened to the Saints over the past decade.
What has always sucked: Oh you mean these fans?
I knew in advance that certain teams like the Chiefs would have fans in attendance to begin the season but I wasn’t really prepared for what it would be like to see it with my own eyes. And the rona shakes were merely one part of the horror. Somehow there was a worse part to it all, which is that the Chiefs put a welcome mat out for all rona truthers within a 50-mile radius to come to their games. These reduced crowds are like panning for racists. Like you filtered a normal crowd through a sieve so that you only got Missouri Wahlbergs.
So this is what I’m looking at all season long: the NFL making transparently empty gestures against racism in front of the MOST racist possible audience. And there’s no shortage of fucksticks lining the Kansas/Missouri border. I know Chiefs fans have been through a lot, but they don’t deserve this team. This team should be playing in, like, New Zealand. They shouldn’t be forced to play their trade in front of a bunch of burnt-end addicts all drooling rona into each other’s chili.
Do the Chiefs care that their fans are hayseeds with terminal perspiration disorder? LOL nope. Did those same fans INSTANTLY disregard the supposed new guidelines in place to keep them from being racist? You know they did. You heard it with your own ears, well before kickoff.
Ethically speaking, the Chiefs are Washington now. It's quite an Xbox Live achievement to get outflanked by Daniel Snyder on something like this, but you Chiefs fans had the Great Plains tenacity to pull it off. You deserve none of this. You deserve to go the same route the WFT did: fucking up year after year after year in a futile chase to restore glory that you never deserved to begin with. You fucking sicken me. I wish The Joker had flown balloons filled with nerve gas over Arrowhead last week and emptied them out. Then the rest of us would have been protected from that Sturgis rally of a crowd bleeding back into the population. You are a mold upon humanity. No wonder Laurent Duvernay-Tardif opted out. It’s safer being around established rona patients than being around you shitstains. Fuck the Chiefs. Fuck the stupid chop. Fuck the Hunt family. Fuck Tyreek. Fuck Andy’s queso visor. Fuck Kansas City on BOTH sides of the river. And fuck Josh Hawley with a patio umbrella.
What might not suck: Clyde Edwards-Helaire is on my keeper team. I adore him.
Ratto says: “If general manager Brett Veach screws this up because of cap space or forgetting that saving Patrick Mahomes's life is literally Job One, he should first be fired, and then fired into the sun. That means losing people like guard Laurent Duvernay-Tardif for reasons of medical ethics (he opted out to help people with COVID in a Quebec hospital, the showoff) is both admirable and a dangerous precedent. NFL people donating athletes to greater causes is the kind of thing that most of this fanbase would find intolerable.”
HEAR IT FROM CHIEFS FANS!
Matt:
Yea, we did it. We won the Super Bowl. We had to beat a team Bill O’Brien put together, a Ryan Tannehill lead team, and a QB who looked like a tan Ryan Tannehill. And we almost lost all three of these fucking games.
Will we repeat? God I almost hope not. Kansas City fans IMMEDIATELY became the most obnoxious fans in football. I’ve never seen a group of people who so collectively need to be humbled. Midwest nice went right out the fucking window.
Fuck Dee Ford to hell.
Ryan:
It took 11 seconds after the Super Bowl for Chiefs’ fans to become Boston West.
Tyler:
There was a high speed car chase along the Super Bowl parade route about an hour before it started in February. That was pretty cool.
Kevin:
If Andy gets it... He'll die. No question.
Kip:
We have no idea how to handle any kind of success in anything.
Jeff:
They scream at players for "disrespecting the anthem", yet yell "Home of the Chiefs" every time the anthem is sung anywhere in town.
If this really does turn into a dynasty you're gonna find out that Boston fans were not special in their ability to be insufferable.
Conor:
I went to the Houston playoff game and saw the greatest sports game of my entire life. Then the entirety of 77,000 fans sang "Friends in Low Places" by Garth Brooks and I wanted to scoop my eyeballs out of my head.
Brian:
Everyone is always going to count us out, no one will believe in us and oh God it's already started, it's too late for me, save yourselves!
Andy:
Over 200,000 Americans will die by YE and we are running Pat out there to get in a cluster tackle and someone with C19 is going to cough on him. This is so stupid.
Kyle:
I for one, welcome the bandwagon fans that should help dilute the garbage fanbase of this city.
Also, I remember watching the Super Bowl parade all day, and this city didn't show up at all for that shit. For a team that screams "Loudest and Best Fans in the NFL" they sure didn't show up. Golden State Warriors of Football, huh? Man, I can't wait til we drop a 3-1 lead to Cleveland.
Mitch:
Winning the Super Bowl in 2020 is an incredible achievement crowning a great postseason run featuring an exciting young QB. Yet no one will remember it in 20 years because it happened during the year of the Pandemic, of killer wasps, of George Floyd’s murder and of who knows what other untold horrors that have yet to unfold until the presidential election.
If this isn’t a perfect metaphor for the Chiefs, who finally got their moment of triumph, but too late for anybody to give a shit, I don’t know what is.
Tim:
They didn't have any playoff success in the 90s with good teams when I was young enough that any celebration may have consisted of running around the house screaming or something. Instead, they waited until I was in my 30s, bordering on alcoholism, jaded from decades of hilariously bad football. So when I finally got to see them win the Super Bowl, all of that pent-up energy was released. My buddy's recliner was snapped in half and my legs were bleeding because I tried to climb a light pole that had a rock texture on it. Fuck you, Chiefs, that was your fault.
Kyle:
It's still flyover country with locals desperately trying to make it relevant by wearing KC-branded shirts designed like something an actual tourist wouldn't be caught dead wearing. Our downtown still leads the country in unused surface lots and highways per capita. We have a "light rail" that only travels in a straight line for 21 blocks and back. The Plaza has turned into a low-rent mall. Boulevard Wheat sucks.
Fuck Tyreek Hill for making me cheer for a domestic abuser. Fuck Mahomes' insanely annoying and entitled fiance who treats everyone but him like shit. Fuck the Raiders, Broncos, and John Elway forever. Fuck every mouth-breathing Pats fan that insists on butting in into any Super Bowl conversation with SIX RANGS, and fuck me for enjoying the ride from rebels to The Empire.
Sarah:
Patrick Mahomes is a generational marvel but he'll be throwing to the hot dog vendor in a couple years when his offensive weapons become free agents and the team can't scrape enough change from the couch cushions to convince them to stick around.
White people in Kansas City fall into two distinct categories:
1. Overtly racist Northland drunks who think downtown KC is like the stock footage of New York City in 80s movies when it's actually a gentrified, tacky bar district void of any discernible culture whatsoever. They're too chickenshit to leave the suburbs, so they carry a loaded gun on them anytime they go south of the river, yet posture as the toughest guys on the planet while getting in chest-bump fights at Buffalo Wild Wings anytime someone mentions KU or Mizzou sports (they didn't attend either school).
2. Hip, woke registered Democrats who live in historically redlined south KC and gleefully post a BLM sign in their yards, but will quietly vote against any measures to integrate their lily-white schools. Their only Black friend is actually their coworker and they'll be sure to include that person in every Instagram photo from their weekend gender reveal party.
Want to go to a Chiefs game? Gas up the car because the stadium is a thousand miles away from the fun part of the city, deep in the MAGAphetamine capital of America. If you're one of the twelve people who decides to be safe and not drive blackout drunk after the game, good luck getting your Uber to pick you up within three miles of the stadium.
Plan on going anywhere in Kansas City after the game? Don't even glance at a cop car or you'll get pepper-sprayed by an illiterate, aggro, sentient goatee in wraparound Oakleys. They'll plant an empty water bottle on you and call it a weapon, charge you with a felony, and then play victim on their whiny KC police Twitter account.
Every college and university in Missouri and Kansas is just a factory churning out warm bodies for the two major employers in town--Enterprise Rent-a-Car and a gigantic medical technology company that sold shitty software to the VA. My dumb ass worked for both of them.
The barbeque is fucking good, though.
Tim:
If you've ever bounced around SBNation's various NFL team site comments sections, you get a good sense for how the online segments of fanbases act. I've spent most of my time lurking in the Chiefs and fellow AFC West comments. Through this, I have actually come to really respect the Raiders fanbase. Many of them aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer, but many are at least open and honest about our culture's ills.
In contrast, my own team's online fanbase is a disgusting pig slop of the worst, most comfortable small business tyrants in existence. Players opting out due to caution about the pandemic? Kill the lazy bums and take them to court so you can recoup the cap space. Draft pick gets stuck behind two established veterans and then has a major injury during training camp? He's a bust and it's his own personal failings that force us to call for cutting/trading him. Player speaks up about the extremely obvious racial disparities in this country? This guy's true passion is for protesting, not FOOTBAW, cut his ass, [unintelligible additional racist screeching].
These hogs were blessed, after a truly astonishing drought of quarterback misery, with one of the most talented and entertaining players I've ever witnessed. Instead of being thankful and happy they are hoping (and actively working) to become as hated as the Patriots for how hideously entitled they all are. I bet every single one of them is a landlord.
Samuel:
Kansas City fans were so sick of heartbreaking playoff exits that they decided to sell their collective souls in a bid to win what might be the last Super Bowl ever. If you asked them before the start of the playoffs if they could watch their team win the SB, but in exchange, the United States would be brought to its knees by a virus that pretty much every single other democratic country on Earth has managed to get under reasonable control, pretty much all of us would still take that trade.
But for all the success Kansas City might have on the field in the coming season, all thanks to drafting a QB for the first time in 34 years, they will still get to tout the impressive feat of somehow being slower to change than Dan Snyder and the Washington Team Footballers. And before anyone points out that "Chiefs" isn't a literal racial slur like "Redskins", it's difficult to hold the high ground when your fan base trots out a dumb hick's imitation of a Native American war chant--complete with tomahawk chop hand motions--before every. fucking. game. I want KC to change their name because it's dumb to use people as a mascot, but also because you can tell just how racist someone is by how mad they get about the name change. I also want them to change it to something with multiple syllables so that it will be harder for Cooter and Bud to yell "CHIEEEEFS" instead of "brave" at the end of every single national anthem, no matter if it's a Chiefs game or not. High school basketball game? CHIEFS. Local amateur golf tourney? CHIEFS. Summer symphony in the park? CHIEEFS.
Patrick Mahomes is officially the only thing still tying me to being a fan of this team and their shitty ass inbred fans.
Jordan:
I hope that Patrick wins us multiple Super Bowls, but I'm also terrified Chiefs fans will become some unholy Frankenstein monster of a fanbase, combining the smugness of New England Patriots fans and the sanctimony of St. Louis Cardinals fans. Maybe we should wait a couple years before we try to win again.
Michael:
On October 6th, 2019, after the Chiefs had lost to the Jacoby Brissett-led Colts, I went to the ER with abdominal pain. During the ultrasound, they discovered a mass on my kidney that turned out to be cancer. I overreacted, panicked, and told myself I was probably gonna die soon. But I wasn't gonna die before seeing my hometown team win the Super Bowl! I ended up losing the kidney in April (surgery during a pandemic is interesting...), but I'm cancer-free, and my future looks bright! I mean, outside of America burning to the ground and whatnot.
Haters are gonna blame COVID if we repeat, but IDGAF. The cupboard is stocked for years to come! Only a global pandemic, worsened by an inept Republican government can stand in the way of true greatness & the start of a NFL dynasty!
Welcome to the apocalypse, motherfuckers!
Thanks to all the readers and Defector staffers who helped compile this series for another year.
