The Chiefs Have Built an Untouchable Mystique

When I was 10 through 12, I played for McDonald’s in my local Babe Ruth League. All the teams were named after their sponsors. So we weren’t, like, the Tigers with a big McDonald’s patch on our sleeves, we were just McDonald’s. We weren’t the best team, nor were we the worst team. For three straight seasons, we were comfortably mediocre.

The best teams were Pizza King and Hartzell Deep Steam. They were so good, they had a mystique about them. They had the two hardest-throwing kids in town, and the only games they ever lost were to each other. They were so infuriatingly good that when I’d pass the Pizza King and Hartzell Deep Steam buildings on the bus to school I’d get angry.

At the start of each season, we’d look at when we played those two teams and would start scheming. For three years of my childhood, figuring out how to beat Pizza King and Hartzell Deep Steam consumed my summers. We, of course, never did. I had a walk-off grand slam against Hartzell Deep Steam robbed to end one game. I cried.

Life for Kansas City Chiefs fans has been more-or-less similar. On perpetual loop, we felt the mystique of seemingly unbeatable teams consume the league, including the Chiefs. Depending on the era, every time the Patriots, Steelers, Ravens, or even the Colts popped up on the schedule, there’d be the unmistakable feeling of inevitable demise that would form in the soul.

But finally, at long last, the Chiefs are Hartzell Deep Steam, and everyone else is crying.

When the Chiefs not only beat the Ravens but systematically dismantled them, they permanently sealed their position as the unstoppable monster of this era of the NFL.

You can feel it in the reaction to their victory. There’s a mix of awe and “Welp, we’re screwed” in the atmosphere. The Ravens were near-universal picks to win. Despite the Chiefs coming off a Super Bowl season, the Ravens came into Monday Night Football with the hype of being the league’s actual best team. Then the whistle blew to start the game, and the Ravens got decimated.

After the game, Lamar Jackson called the Chiefs the Ravens’ “kryptonite.” John Harbaugh lamented being outplayed, out-schemed, out-coached, out-everything’d. And, naturally, there were the whines of refball.

Jackson seemed to be a little tongue-in-cheek when he called the Chiefs their kryptonite, but that it even came up is telling. It doesn’t matter if you’re 11 and playing against Pizza King or a professional athlete at the peak of human ability playing against other professional athletes at the peak of human ability, aura and mystique are real things that impact the way you play.

I have always and will always defer to the analytics. But there are simply aspects of sport that are controlled by uniquely human forces that numbers cannot quantify. Humans are storytellers. We obsessively turn our lives into narratives with heroes and villains. That extends to sports in a very forward-facing way.

Throughout the Patriots’ dynasty, their home-field advantage was legendary. It wasn’t exclusively built on talent and “Do Your Job” obsession with detail. Those things built their way to win, and the winning built an aura in Foxborough that was unmistakable. If we felt it as fans watching our favorite teams coming out of the tunnel in Gillette Stadium, you know the teams were feeling it, too.

Players and coaches will always claim none of that impacts them, but that’s a lie. They’re human. They spend their entire careers engulfed in all these storylines and narratives. We’ve watched good team after good team enter New England and play visibly tight, erratic, nervous, or all three. Just being in the Patriots’ presence has been enough to knock teams off their game.

Arrowhead Stadium’s advantage has always been exclusively in decibels. It’s always been “You don’t wanna face the Chiefs in Arrowhead.” When the games really mattered, though, it being loud didn’t change the ending for Kansas City.

But now, Arrowhead’s volume will be secondary to the team itself. The Chiefs themselves are carrying a mystique wherever they play. Andy Reid was once the smart-but-goofy guy who had some cute plays but called bad timeouts and lost big games. Now he’s a playcalling mastermind whose wizardry mystifies and infuriates all who oppose him. Patrick Mahomes, once the exciting kid with a rocket arm, has quickly become a dangerous quarterbacking behemoth who consumes the cosmos and seemingly lacks a single spot of weakness.

In a lot of ways, the Ravens felt like the last hope for the AFC to even be a contest for the foreseeable future. People wanted a rivalry, but the Chiefs proved they have no rivals.

Right now in the NFL, it’s the Chiefs, a universe-sized gap, and then there’s everybody else.