For The Win
It is absolutely okay to hate the Kansas City Chiefs.
As the team readies for its fifth Super Bowl berth in six seasons, NFL fans are faced with a real dilemma. Is it finally acceptable to pull out the football torches and pitchforks and ramp up the Kansas City hate like never before?
Sunday’s AFC championship win over the Buffalo Bills doomed fans who are tired of seeing quarterback Patrick Mahomes and company make the big game to … another year of Mahomes and company making the big game.
Mahomes must know by now how frustrated his “haters” are that he keeps finding ways to make the Super Bowl, even after everything in the regular season points to other teams being more deserving. His sassy Kermit the Frog GIF in response to making Super Bowl 59 spoke volumes.
Only two of the last 11 Super Bowls haven’t featured the Chiefs or the New England Patriots. It’s why the Chiefs are effectively the new Patriots, and we all know where the Patriots landed by the end of the Tom Brady/Bill Belichick years. Nobody mourned New England’s descent into the NFL’s basement, and nobody will mourn Kansas City’s inevitable tumble off the NFL’s Mount Olympus once it eventually happens … one day.
As trite as it is to quote Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight nowadays, his famous words ring true. You really do either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain in professional football The Chiefs are the NFL’s villains, and societally, we love to hate villains and have every right to do so.
Between the allegations of “rigging” over, as ESPN’s Adam Schefter pointed out, lopsided officiating performances in Kansas City playoff games to the truly bewildering streak of luck the team had to get wins in 2024, this season underlines as many as any how tiresome it can get to watch the Chiefs win.
The team being on the doorstep of a Super Bowl three-peat has brought out the sanctimony patrol in full force, with CBS Sports’ Nate Burleson on Sunday admonishing anybody who wasn’t grateful they were in the presence of one of the greatest NFL teams of all time. It was the same way with Brady’s Patriots. The finger-wagging over complaining about these exhaustive juggernauts’ sustained success abounded.
How dare we not bend the knee to watching our favorite football teams flail in the presence of greatness? How could we, mere peons in the grand scheme of football, deny Mahomes and his Chiefs from the all-time glories that we’d just love our teams to experience just once? We should be so lucky to get a whiff of the staunch ketchup fumes emanating from Mahomes’ fresh dish of Andy Reid’s macaroni and cheese.
Mahomes has gone from being the gawkish fellow from Texas Tech with the Kermit voice to being in contention with Brady for the best NFL quarterback of all time, and he grows more annoying in his success as the...
