The doubt in NFL dynasties: Why Chiefs are fighting the odds, beyond the opening dud

Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes strolled across the perimeter of the grass inside State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, a late-August trek in which he outlined the pregame walk he’d taken there just six months earlier. It just so happened he was donning a nearly identical outfit to what he wore that Super Bowl Sunday, too.

At one point, his warmup routine for a preseason game paused a few steps from where he had rushed onto the field amid falling confetti in February. You had to think it all prompted some fond memories.

Right?

“Not really,” he said.

Maybe in one aspect, on second thought. The final score. After the Chiefs finished off a preseason win, a coach reminded him they produced an identical offensive output (38 points) as they did when beating the Eagles in the Super Bowl.

“Other than that,” Mahomes said, “it was just another football game.”

OK, then. But let’s get this straight. A year ago, Mahomes couldn’t shake the result of the previous season from his mind. Said he’d never truly get over that playoff loss in the AFC Championship Game on his home field.

But after spending more than 12 months turning that into the fuel for a much different result, he so quickly forgot about the payoff that not even the environment could jog his memory.

Seems a bit hard to believe, because, well, it’s strategic. He wants to forget about it. Wants everyone else to forget, too. He’s fine if a loss lingers in his mind. The entire point is to forget about the win.

It’s been the point for three months, when hours before Chiefs players received their Super Bowl rings, Mahomes gathered them after a practice and basically told them, yeah, enjoy tonight, but then no more.

Why?

Because he knows the numbers. Hell, we all know the numbers. It’s been 18 years since a Super Bowl champion did just that — defended its Super Bowl championship.

A deeper dive, though, illustrates it’s bleaker than a title drought. Among the last 17 champions, it’s been more common for teams to miss the playoffs altogether (six) than to win a playoff game (five). Only three teams won more than one game in the postseason.

Yes, it’s hard to win in the NFL, but we’re not asking why a team hasn’t had its name randomly pulled from a hat back-to-back years. These are teams that won the whole thing. Theoretically, they should be pretty decent. The one in Kansas City certainly still is.

While it’s true that a salary-capped league makes it harder to keep a winning roster together, all but one of those past 17 teams returned its quarterback. (Peyton Manning retired after winning with the Broncos in 2015. Put an asterisk by the Eagles, who were led to an 11-2 record by Carson Wentz, only for Nick Foles to take over for the stretch and playoff runs.)

It produces a lot of ways to say what the Chiefs are trying to accomplish this season isn’t easy, even with the player atop everyone’s list of the most valuable. And one week into the year, wouldn’t you know it, they already have a reminder of it. They are 0-1 for the first time since Mahomes became the starting quarterback.

They ought to receive that as the warning shot it is — not that they have taken a step back, but rather a reminder of the onward march that’s coming for them. After the loss to Detroit, safety Justin Reid acknowledged that it sure seemed like the Lions were just a tad fired up to play the defending champions. Well, so it goes.

Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo told me he actually noticed the same thing a month earlier against the Saints in a preseason game. On Thursday, Chiefs receiver Skyy Moore attributed the array of drops on Opening Night to a lack of focus.

So, yeah, it has an influence.

Andy Reid saw it coming. Somewhere in the middle of summer, the Chiefs head coach met with Mahomes with a quick message. Forget about 2022. And can you help make sure everyone else moves on, too?

Maybe Mahomes has truly washed the Super Bowl from his memory. Maybe it was gone before that meeting. Or maybe it’s something he will have to remind himself over and over again.

It certainly feels like more than a coincidence that the Chiefs are having this how-to-move-on-from-a-title discussion one year after responding to the most agonizing loss of Mahomes’ career. If that was relevant then — if you can be motivated by the bad taste — isn’t the lack of that taste relevant, too?

All the while the reminders of that pesky other thing — you know, the Lombardi Trophy — are incessant.

The NFL schedule arrived on May 11. For reference, that’s 25 days before the Chiefs visited the White House to celebrate last season. It’s 35 days before the ring ceremony to, again, recognize the accomplishments of last season. As the Chiefs are still parading through the thrills of a title, other teams have long moved on.

“Every year, there are 31 teams teams that think they gotta be better than they were last year,” Spagnuolo said. “And there’s one just trying to do the same thing.”

I wanted to fully tap into how much that matters. We know last year’s best team is somehow against the odds one year later. But how? Why?

So I asked guys on the other side of it.

The Chiefs locker room is sprinkled with players who know what the Lions felt last week, what the Jaguars will feel this week and what 15 other teams on the schedule will experience over the next four months.

Such as Jawaan Taylor, Kansas City’s right tackle who spent last season with Jacksonville. Ahead of the Jaguars’ trip to Arrowhead Stadium for the playoffs in January, Taylor said, “all we talked about was the chance to go to the loudest stadium in the world and beat the very best. There wasn’t anybody slacking that week (of practice). And when nobody expects you to (win), you got nothing to lose.”

Next, I walked to the locker of Drue Tranquill, a former Chargers linebacker who played against the Chiefs five times before joining them in the offseason.

His answer is pretty illuminating:

“You have to preach to yourself to not look past opponents, because there was a lot of built-up energy to play the Chiefs,” Tranquill said. “The game is circled on your schedule.”

And then a pause.

“You’re looking forward to that game before the schedule even comes out — because when you’re in the same division, you know it’s going to be on there.”

And then to James Winchester, the Chiefs’ longtime long snapper. He was here back when the Chiefs visited New England and watched them roll out inflatable trophy after inflatable trophy to celebrate all they’d done.

“I remember how that felt. We wanted a piece of what they had. Even though it was a new season and it wasn’t the same roster, you saw them celebrating,” Winchester said. “In professional ball, or D1 or high school or whatever, you always want to play the best and you want to beat the best. I think that’s everybody’s mentality coming in to play us.”

And that plays a factor on game day?

“Not just game day. You’re focused all week.”

Teams will still occasionally play poorly against the Chiefs, to be sure. They will not, however, have letdowns against the Chiefs. They will not overlook the Chiefs. In fact, they might overlook other teams just to get to the Chiefs.

I don’t mean for all of this to sound like foreign territory in Kansas City, though I do mean for it to sound like rugged territory. It was just three years ago that the Chiefs went through it all.

On the surface, they handled it quite well. They were 14-2 in the regular season, and who knows what might have happened in that Super Bowl if not for some injuries along the offensive line.

By some measures, though, the Chiefs were one of the most fortunate teams in football. They broke an NFL record with seven straight one-possession wins. It’s the only season in which a Mahomes-led offense finished outside the top-five in scoring. Pro Football Focus graded them as the 10th-best team in the NFL.

While that’s a convenient retrospective for this column, I’ll admit, that’s not only my spin on it.

Although Mahomes said he hasn’t studied the nature of this particular kind of drought, he has studied one team involved in it. His own.

At some point, he realizes also in retrospect, the Chiefs became content with their wins in 2020. Maybe not with the previous Super Bowl victory but with the wins of that season. When the result all seems to be going so well, it can be a deception of the process itself.

“You learn that a lot in the NFL — you might have a great start to the season, but as the season goes on, you have to keep building or other teams are going to catch you,” Mahomes said. “You want to be the best team at the end of the season just as much as you want to be the best team at the beginning.”

They’re already been reminded of the difficulty of the latter.

Even more challenging to meet the former.