Making sense of the Chiefs' mess. Well, trying to, anyway.
The Kansas City Star
The plan is to have more in the column that will post later today, particularly about Eric Winston and the fans, but for now here I hope you read this morning’s column on the Chiefs’ awful dilemma about becoming the Browns.
Also, the idea of the disconnect between the franchise and fans is something I’ve been writing about for a few weeks.
Anyway, about that game…
+ Jamaal Charles is being used like a rented mule, two years after the Chiefs went to great lengths to limit his usage and one year after ACL surgery. There have been three times this season a running back has been given 30 or more carries, and Charles is two of them.
That’s great for the Chiefs’ now — he is absolutely their best chance to win — but rotten for their tomorrow. A losing season is turning into a lost one, but what’s worse is if Romeo Crennel burns out Charles’ effectiveness chasing his own job security in a lost season.
+ Speaking of Romeo, he gave a completely non-sense answer when asked why he decided to punt instead of try for a first down or a Hail Mary with 12 seconds left in the first half. Essentially, Romeo said he wasn’t willing to take the risk because any time you snap the ball there’s a risk of something bad happening.
Apparently, in Romeo’s world, snapping the ball 15 yards back to the punter is immune from this risk.
+ Brady Quinn stinks as a quarterback, and I feel confident in saying that because as I wrote in Sunday’s column he’s played behind Derek Anderson, Charlie Frye, Ken Dorsey, Bruce Gradkowski, Tim Tebow and Kyle Orton in his career.
But after he came in, it was nice to see a Chiefs quarterback able to throw the ball down field with some velocity.
Been a while.
+ So the Chiefs’ defense held the league’s No. 2 offense to nine points — Baltimore’s first game without a TD since 2009, by the way — and just 298 yards of total offense and, for the effort, get to pretend this was a team loss instead of one effectively guaranteed by an overmatched head coach coming up with a gameplan designed primarily to limit the impact of the overmatched quarterback who he refused to go away from.
If the guys on that defense really don’t feel like they got jobbed out of what would’ve been a crucial victory, they have a remarkable ability to compartmentalize frustration.
+ We have a contractor over to do some work on the house, and it turns out he had Chiefs season tickets for so long they were $15 per game when he first signed up.
He gave them up three years ago.
“It wasn’t the losing,” he said. “We just weren’t having fun. The Chiefs organization just choked the fun out of tailgating.”
Dustin Lewis
7 months, 2 weeks agoMy grandpa gave up his season tickets 3 years ago also. He’d had them since 1970 but he decided he could sit at home and watch them lose rather than pay the ever increasing cost.
Steve Glasscock
7 months, 2 weeks agoAs someone who has held Chiefs season tickets since 1968, I, as usual, was at the game yesterday. I did not experience the behavior Eric Winston described. Our section did not cheer Matt Cassel’s injury. In fact, we all stood and cheered for Cassel as he walked off the field. I just watched a replay from the game, and still could not hear what Winston was so passionately complaining about. The announcers made no reference to it either. Some fans may have smiled or even cheered at Cassel’s injury, I guess, but that behavior was not apparent from where I sat. Now the next day, Merrill Hoge and Ron Jaworski are calling Chiefs fans “disgusting” and saying this reputation will be hard to live down.
Long-suffering Chiefs fans (that phrase, now a cliché) spend thousands of dollars to loyally support a team that goes decades between playoff wins. A lot of people already thought of us as suckers to spend this kind of money; now we are all subjected to embarrassing ridicule in the national media, labeled disgusting louts because of some exaggerated slight to our QB. Winston says he will shoulder the blame, but he has effectively shifted the focus of post-game discussion away from missed blocks, turnovers, penalties and an offense without a touchdown to how sickening Chiefs fans are. I am more than upset. I am “sickened.”
Daniel Chon
7 months, 2 weeks agoFans could have been cheering for a number of different factors. (Cassel getting up, Quinn warming up, etc) The fans that did cheer when Cassel got injured do not represent the “ENTIRE” Kansas City fan base. The frustration of our fan base is understandable..we keep soaking and taking all these losses in, close games we should’ve won, our playoff win drought and it just keeps building up so I understand why some fans may have been cheering when the injury occurred, but that is unacceptable still. I was not at the game or did not watch the particular play when Cassel got injured. We have seen what Cassel could do for us. Now, it is time to see what Brady Quinn can do.
If our season continues to go the way it does, I hope we can get a QB in the first round in next year’s draft. (Geno Smith). It is time to invest in a QB in the first round and see where he can take us. Look around the league and you can see that teams are trying to build their teams with a young QB. (NY Jets, Carolina, Miami, Tennessee, St. Louis, Indy, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincy). We can’t afford to continue to ignore one of the most important positions on the football field. I don’t know how much more I can tolerate this as a Chiefs fan, but I will continue to have hope for this team, and our owner, GM, coaches, and players!