The Agony of the “Griefs”

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alex smith, andrew luck, chiefs, denver broncos, football, futility, indianapolis colts, kansas city, kansas city chiefs, losing, NFL, peyton manning, playoffs, sports, wild card

There’s a lot of manufactured excitement here in Kansas City this week. The local NFL team, the Chiefs, is in the playoffs for just the third time in the past 10 years. Kansas City sports talk radio stations are filling air time with roundtable discussions about whether the Chiefs can steal a win from the Colts in Indianapolis on Saturday. The Kansas City Star has interviewed everyone from quarterback Alex Smith to the team’s water boy about the big game. This, according to the local media, is a major sporting event for Kansas City.

Missed field goals in the playoffs, like burnt ends, are a KC tradition.

Here’s the thing, though: everyone in town knows that the Chiefs will lose this game, and probably lose it badly. That is not just because the Chiefs are playing on the road against a team that thrashed them, 23-7, just two weeks ago. It is because losing in the playoffs is part of the team’s DNA. It is what the Chiefs, known to some Kansas Citians as the “Griefs,” do more effectively than perhaps any other NFL team.

Since winning their only Super Bowl in January 1970, the Chiefs have gone an amazing 3-12 in the playoffs. They have not won a single playoff game since January 16, 1994, when Joe Montana led them to an improbable win over the Houston Oilers. That was such a long time ago that the Oilers are now the Tennessee Titans, and Joe Montana has a son who plays quarterback for Tulane. Twenty years is a long, damn time between playoff wins. During that period, there have been a handful of heartbreaking losses to keep everyone entertained, including:

– A 10-7 defeat at home to the Colts in 1996, a game in which the heavily favored Chiefs turned the ball over four times and missed three field goals in sub-zero weather.

– A demoralizing 14-10 loss to archrival Denver at Arrowhead in 1998 in which Chiefs quarterback Elvis Grbac could not convert a fourth-and-one deep in Denver territory in the game’s final minute (Chiefs fans, check out this Denver fan’s gleeful summary of the game if you really want to get steamed). The Broncos went on to win the Super Bowl that year.

Yes, it’s been a while.

– Another loss at home to the Colts in 2004, this time by a 38-31 score. This game is notable for the fact that the Chiefs defense never once forced the Colts to punt. Peyton Manning toyed with the boys in red by completing 22 of 30 passes for 304 yards and 3 touchdowns.

This record of futility is well-known to the Colts, who have beaten the Chiefs three of the last five times Kansas City has made the playoffs. The people of Indianapolis can’t wait for the Chiefs to get into town. They might even throw them a parade.

Well, maybe the Chiefs are due for a little postseason success, you might say. Maybe they will do better since Saturday’s game isn’t at Arrowhead, you might suggest. Well, that’s possible, I guess. But even if you ignore 20 years of futility, the current-day fact is that this Chiefs team, like so many before, just isn’t all that great. The Chiefs got off to an impressive 9-0 start by capitalizing on weak competition – only one of the wins over that stretch came against a playoff team. Over the last seven games of the season, as the competition has gotten tougher, the Chiefs are 2-5, winning games against hapless Washington (3-13) and Oakland (4-12).

A smiling Peyton Manning is a familiar sight for Chiefs fans.

There’s another long-time bugaboo working against this Chiefs team: the quarterback position. Alex Smith, whom the Chiefs acquired from the 49ers in the offseason, is a capable field manager. He doesn’t make very many mistakes, and he is having a career year this season. However, the Colts have an even better quarterback in Andrew Luck, heir to Peyton Manning and the player that everyone expects to be the Colts’ cornerstone for years to come. When the Chiefs and Colts faced off two weeks ago, Luck threw for a touchdown and Smith tossed two interceptions. No one will be too surprised if those numbers are similar in Saturday’s rematch.

The lack of a superstar quarterback, more than anything else, has been Kansas City’s undoing in the playoffs. In games against Dan Marino, Peyton Manning, John Elway and Jim Kelly, the Chiefs have put up Steve DeBerg, Trent Green, Elvis Grbac and Dave Krieg. Sad, isn’t it? In my opinion, there’s no coincidence that the team’s only real playoff success of the past 40 years, wins against the Steelers and Oilers in 1994, came with a fading but still great Joe Montana at helm. The formula is simple: you need a brilliant quarterback to win NFL playoff games. Other than the Len Dawson glory days of the 1960s and the two seasons they had with Montana in the ’90s, the Chiefs have never measured up in that department.

While this year’s team will probably be hitting the golf course after Saturday, there is hope that Chiefs can someday make some postseason noise. Head coach Andy Reid led the Eagles to several trips to the NFC Championship and one Super Bowl. He is known as a savvy developer of pro quarterbacks like Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick. The fact that he has the Chiefs in the playoffs at all this season is a small miracle. The team went 2-14 a year ago with most of the same players.

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to see all of Kansas City celebrate a playoff victory. No town deserves it more. I just don’t think it’s going to happen this year. But, for the first time in a long time, the future looks good for Kansas City’s favorite sports team. Maybe someday soon, they will steal a big game from one of those great teams like the Colts, Broncos or Patriots. Then, and only then, will the Chiefs no longer be the Griefs.

I Can’t Quit You, Mizzou

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college, college football, fifth down game, football, gamecocks, missouri, my life, south carolina, tigers

It was a happy night for Carolina.

Immediately after Missouri’s horrific, deplorable 27-24 loss last night to South Carolina, in which the Tigers blew a 17-point fourth quarter lead, then gave up a touchdown on 4th down and 15, then botched a chip-shot field goal that would have tied the game in overtime, I received a text message from one of my best friends from college.

“I quit,” my friend wrote. “I’m serious. I’m not watching, listening, or caring ever again.”

I wish I could say the same, as last night’s debacle will surely join many other infamous, heartbreaking defeats in Mizzou sports history. Unfortunately, I am hooked on the Tigers permanently, and there’s a part of me that feels strangely proud to have survived so many ridiculously devastating defeats (for a rundown on some of the bigger ones, see my post here from last spring). I imagine that fans of the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Browns and other star-crossed sports teams feel much the same way. Even the followers of the victorious South Carolina Gamecocks can relate to our pain – their team has only won one conference football championship in its 100-plus year history.

Being a Mizzou fan is tough. It’s like falling in love with a woman who wears a lot of glitter and knows the name of every bartender in the metro area. It’s fun for a while, but you know she’s going to eventually break your heart.

“I liked it better when we were regularly getting thumped by Iowa State,” my friend went on to text. “At least I didn’t get my hopes up.”

Defeats like the one last night take me back to one of my first experiences with Missouri’s version of Lady Luck. It was the notorious Fifth Down Game of 1990, and I would like to say that I was there in the Faurot Field stands that sunny October afternoon, screaming at the officials. I would like to say that, but the fact is that I chose that weekend to attend a church conference in Overland Park, Kansas, with a group called Campus Crusaders for Christ. Me and my devout friends had taken a couple of cars from the DoubleTree Hotel to dinner that Saturday afternoon. When we arrived at the parking lot of Fuddruckers, two guys got out of the other car and asked if we were listening to the Colorado game.

We huddled around one of the car radios and listened breathlessly as Tiger announcer Bill Wilkerson called the game’s final, frenzied minute. When Colorado quarterback Charles Johnson surged toward the end zone on the last play, Wilkerson screamed, “They stopped him! They stopped him!… Wait! They’re signaling touchdown! No! No! No! No! No!”

If Christian boys had been prone to cussing, there would have been a lot of expletives flying around Overland Park that night. Some of the words might have sounded a lot like “Fuddruckers.” Instead, we sadly filed into the restaurant and lined up for the burger buffet. “Man, if we had won that game, we would have been three-and-two,” one of my friends said. “Can you imagine that? Three-and-two!”

We didn’t know about the fifth down controversy until the next morning (here’s an excellent article about the whole thing from ESPN.com). We drove past Faurot Field on our way back to campus that Sunday afternoon and saw that the stadium had been trashed – both sets of goalposts were torn down. For weeks afterward, Missouri students wore T-shirts defiantly proclaiming Tigers 31, Buffaloes 27, the “real” score of the game. I quit Campus Crusaders later on that fall. Maybe it was because nothing seemed to make sense anymore. Maybe it was because my involvement in the group caused me to miss the most historic sports moment of my college career.

I’m a lot older now, and the games don’t affect me nearly as much. I’m only depressed for about a 24-hour period after one of the Tigers’ signature defeats. Still, as I watched that last field goal attempt sail into the black night and bounce off of the left upright, I jumped up and down and channeled Bill Wilkerson from that Colorado game:

No! No! No! No! No!

A Dawg Fan’s Loss of Innocence

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childhood, civil war, college football, dawgs, football, georgia bulldogs, herschel walker, joe paterno, larry munson, penn state, sugar bowl, william faulkner

William Faulkner once famously wrote that, for every Southern boy, “there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.” He was referring to the Battle of Gettysburg shortly before Pickett’s Charge, when there was still a wisp of hope for the Southern cause. What happened after that was complete disaster but, up until that moment, there was still a chance at victory.

Southern boys of Faulkner’s generation might have still felt a connection to that chivalrous and doomed moment for the South. But for Southern boys my age, that loss of innocence most likely came when their favorite college football came close to lasting glory, but failed.

For me, that moment was the evening of January 1, 1983. The University of Georgia was playing Penn State in the Sugar Bowl for the National Championship. Penn State started out strong, building a 20-3 lead shortly before halftime. But the Bulldogs rallied. With a little more than four minutes to go in the game, Herschel Walker plunged into the end zone to cut Penn State’s lead to 27-23, the last touchdown he would score in his legendary college career. I perched on the edge of our sofa, staring intently at our 20-inch RCA television, willing Penn State to give the ball back. Georgia was going to win the game. All they had to do was force a punt, punch in another score and win the national title for the second time in three years. They had always won in the short time I had been a rabid Dawgs fan. Sometimes it came in miraculous fashion, but Georgia always won. Tonight would be no different. As Faulkner might have put it, “the brigades were in position, the guns were laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags were already loosened…”

At least Sports Illustrated was happy about it.

Herschel never got the ball back. Penn State finally punted with four seconds to go, and the game was over. Joe Paterno, about whom we know so much more today than we did back then, got the victory ride. The Yankees had whupped us again. Less than a month later, Herschel skipped his senior year to play for the USFL, and Bear Bryant was dead. It was a bitter, depressing winter for college football fans in the South.

When you’re a kid and you start paying attention to sports, the tendency is to follow whatever team is having the most success at the time (unless, of course, your parents goad you into rooting for their sad-sack alma mater). For me, the team to follow was Georgia, which had the best player in college football and which lost only four games over a four-year span in the early 1980s. Most of the games weren’t on TV in those days, but Georgia had a brilliant, growling radio announcer named Larry Munson who made every snap vividly intense, and who was at his best when the “Junkyard Dogs” defense had to make a play to seal the win (“Hunker down, you guys,” he once urged them on four straight plays against Auburn. On that day, the Dawgs did exactly that).

The Sugar Bowl against Penn State was one of those awakenings all young sports fans have when they realize their favorite team is not invincible. The next year, there would be an even more painful 13-7 home loss to Auburn, the first defeat between the hedges of Sanford Stadium in more the four years.

Herschel was Superman without the cape (because he didn’t need one).

Georgia would go on to have some good teams and even a couple of great ones, but it would never be quite the same after that. Three decades later, the Dawgs have yet to return to the national championship game. They were one play away last year, almost upsetting Alabama in the final seconds. Maybe this season it will finally happen again. Georgia has another great running back, and lots of experience on both sides of the ball.

At any rate, the start of college football is something I always look forward to this time of year. In October, my own sad-sack alma mater, Missouri, will take on the Dawgs at Sanford Stadium. I’ll root for the Tigers, but a part of me will remember the ghosts of autumn Saturdays past, when the most important thing in my world was the Dawgs hunkering down and finding a way to win.

The Story Behind the Photo… Maybe (Version 5.0)

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betting, family, football, humor, NFL, parenthood, photo fiction, tosh.o

Jeff felt his left eye twitch rhythmically, as it always did when he’d had more than three cups of coffee or was under intense, pounding pressure. For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why Kathy had scheduled a family photo shoot at 4 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

Right now, posing with his wife and six-month-old daughter for an 8 x 11 glossy that would sit on their mantle for the rest of their lives was the last thing on Jeff’s mind. What was on his mind was football, specifically the fourth quarter of the Dallas-Cleveland game. As they parked their car at Portrait Expressions, Tony Romo and the Cowboys were on the Browns’ 24 yard line, threatening to score again.

“Get him! Get him!” Jeff screamed at his iPhone as the screen showed Romo scrambling out of the pocket with two Browns in pursuit.

“Jeff, you’re gonna scare Madison,” Kathy scolded. “Put the phone away.”

He did for the moment. But he tuned in again as they waited in the lobby for the photographer. The Cowboys had settled for a field goal and now the Browns had possession.

“Hold on to the damn ball,” he implored.

“Jeff, stop it!” his wife whispered.

Jeff had never been much of a betting man, but Madison’s arrival and his modest salary as an apprentice landscaper for The Grass Hut encouraged him to a little coin down on some NFL games. When he picked up the Plain Dealer on Monday and saw that the Cowboys were favored to beat Cleveland by 14 points – a betting line of absurd proportions for a professional football game – he couldn’t help but put $500 on the Browns to beat the spread. After all, the game was in Cleveland and it was late November. Anything could happen in those conditions, he thought.

The game was back-and-forth for three quarters, then Dallas pulled away. The field goal had put the Cowboys up 31-21. Now, Jeff pulled the phone from his pants pocket and saw Dallas had the ball again, and was driving. There were four minutes to go.

“Bring him down!” he growled.

“Okay, honey.” With Madison perched on her hip, Kathy grabbed the phone from Jeff’s hand and dumped it into her oversized purse. “No more Fantasy Football today.”

Jeff winced. Kathy had no idea about the bet, of course. She couldn’t imagine how much he had put on the line for his wife and daughter. But he knew he had to do it. Two years ago, as a high school senior, he played Billy Bigelow in the school production of Carousel. At the time, taking a role in the play was just another way to meet girls. But now those words from Billy’s “Soliloquy” seared him with meaning: I’ll go out and make it or steal it or taaaaake it… or die!

Finally, after what seemed like an hour, the photographer appeared and ushered them to a stool in front of a brownish backdrop. Kathy sat on the stool with Madison in her lap, and Jeff kind of crouched up against them, knees bent, like he had just taken a shot to the gut.

“Get in a little closer,” the photographer told Jeff. “Pretend you like ’em.”

Jeff complied. He noticed the guy was wearing a Browns ball cap. That gave him an idea.

“Hey, man,” he said. “You catch the final score of the game? Last I saw, they were down by ten.”

The photographer looked into his lens and chuckled. “Oh, it got worse. Dallas scored two more touchdowns. What are you gonna do? Maybe we’ll get a good draft pick.”

Jeff felt the sensation of what seemed like three golf balls working their way slowly down his throat.

“Smiles, everyone!” the photographer said.

Photo pulled from tosh.comedycentral.com.

The NFL: Bloated, Sanctified, Self-Important

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ben fountain, billy lynn's long halftime walk, culture, espn, football, iraq war, kansas city chiefs, NFL, nfl draft, television

As most of you know, today is hugely important for America because it is the first day of the NFL Draft. Intense coverage of the draft began roughly two minutes after the Super Bowl ended and has continued nonstop on ESPN’s fleet of cable channels since that time. There have been camps, combines, workouts and any number of nattering nabobs speculating on how the draft will transpire. In a way, the NFL Draft has become a season unto itself, only slightly less important than the NFL regular season, and more important than just about everything else in sports.

In Kansas City, where I live, the draft is of particular interest because the hometown Chiefs have the first pick. Locally, there’s been endless guessing about what the Chiefs will do with their coveted selection. The consensus is they will pick a left tackle because there are no elite quarterbacks in the draft and because, well, they’re the Chiefs. There’s a reason why this boring, humdrum team hasn’t visited the Super Bowl since 1970.

“With the first pick of the 2013 NFL Draft, the Kansas City Chiefs select… a left tackle?”

All the hype about the draft, and the fact that the NFL is now a year-round story, mystifys me. Like a lot of people, I watch my share of pro football games, and I track the standings during the season. But there’s an arrogance and hyper sense of self-importance around the NFL that turns me off. Each season, I find myself watching less and less pro football, and the fact that we have a toddler running around the house is only part of the reason for that. The other part is that the games, more often than not, are boring, plodding affairs that steal too much of a Sunday afternoon. The army of television personalities charged with selling the NFL brand also leaves me cold: while the hosts play grab-ass in the studio like a bunch of aging frat boys, the announcers call and analyze the action with the breathless intensity of reporters covering a hostage crisis. Either way you slice it, it’s overdone and over-the-top.

Ben Fountain’s best-seller, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, describes in a single paragraph what the NFL has become better than anything else I have read. His book, which is about how Americans view our soldiers and the Iraq War, takes place over the course of a Dallas Cowboys football game (if that makes no sense whatsoever, click here for this fine review of the novel).

Anyway, here’s how Fountain describes the action on the field at venerable Texas Stadium:

And if it was just this, Billy thinks, just the rude mindless headbanging game of it, then football would be an excellent sport and not the bloated, sanctified, self-important beast it became once the culture got its clammy hands on it. Rules. There are hundreds, and every year they make more, an insidious and particularly gross distortion of the concept of “play,” and then there are the meat-brain coaches with their sadistic drills and team prayers and dyslexia-inducing diagrams, the control-freak refs running around like little Hitlers, the time-outs, the deadening pauses for incompletes, the pontifical ceremony of instant-replay reviews, plus huddles, playbooks, pads, audibles, and all other manner of stupefactive device when the truth of the matter is that boys just want to run around and knock the shit out of each other.

That about covers it. There is no “play” in today’s NFL. And football is far too lucrative now to be considered a mere game. Somewhere along the line, the league engulfed autumn Sundays so completely that many churches have adjusted their service times to accommodate kick-off. It’s official: pro football is bigger than God to a lot of people in this country.