Say hello to the bad guy; Chiefs fans don't owe ignorant football fans an explanation

I've had some time to think about what it means to be a hated dynasty, and I want to talk about it as the Chiefs try to threepeat.

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Oh, is it Super Bowl week again for the Chiefs?

I’m sorry, it feels like it was only yesterday we were talking about Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs facing off against the 49ers… and then a week or so earlier, weren’t we discussing how Andy Reid and company would fare against (checks notes) a stacked Eagles roster?

In some ways, being a Chiefs fan has felt a little bit like Groundhog’s Day, or Live/Die/Repeat (“Edge of Tomorrow” is the other name of this highly underrated Tom Cruise move)… Every day we wake up, and nothing has REALLY changed. Mahomes and the Chiefs, after a season in which they gave people some reasons to doubt them while also giving plenty of reasons to believe in them, are back in the Big Game following winning multiple playoff games people thought the would lose. Cue the music.

Except of course, things do change even as as certain things stay the same (hey, did you hear that THIS Eagles team is the best roster the Chiefs have ever faced in the playoffs… after THAT Bills QB was the best they’d ever faced in the playoffs… following last year’s Ravens team being THE best they’d ever faced in OK I’ll stop now). There are some new faces every year as the roster turns over. There are new schematic wrinkles and new strengths/weaknesses that surround the Foundational Five of Reid, Spags, Mahomes, Kelce, and Jones.

And perhaps most importantly (or frustratingly)… there are new narratives every year. First it was whether the Chiefs could get over 50 years of seemingly generational curses. Then it was whether the Chiefs could overcome the loss of Tyreek Hill and totally revamp their defense in a way that worked. Then it was whether the offense could be competent enough with a bad WR corps to go all the way while overcoming a historically difficult playoff schedule.

All of those narratives were interesting to an extent and at least revolved around football. This year? The narrative has done its best to jump the shark, as now it’s stopped being about football and started become about… well, other stuff.

“The games are rigged.”

“There’s bias for the Chiefs”

“Anyone who wants to beat Kansas City has to go through the refs”

On and on it has gone. What started as sour grapes from sore losers (cough cough Bengals fans cough) over a perfectly legitimate defensive pass interference call at the end of a game (that came RIGHT AFTER the Chiefs had a converted 4th down called by an illegal hands to the face, but I digress) has grown into way more over the course of the last several months. It’s also grown from mere fan discourse (people who cheer for a team that loses have long chosen to blame the refs rather than their own team, that’s nothing new) to coaches complaining after playoff losses and the topic being written about and discussed constantly by “legitimate” NFL media, including during the Super Bowl media week. Roger Goodell, Clark Hunt, and Patrick Mahomes are taking questions from people about the idea of bias or rigging as they make their rounds leading up to Sunday.

And like many other “stories” in modern sports media, the idea of the Chiefs somehow being on the receiving end of “bias” has taken on a life of it’s own. Here’s how the sports media story creation cycle tends to work.

Step 1: Something (it doesn’t matter how stupid, such as Andy Reid “retirement whispers” based on absolutely no sourcing whatsoever) makes the rounds online.

Step 2: The online discourse among fans picks up just enough to catch the attention of one of the attention/click-mongering sites, content creators, or supposed “legitimate” media providers.

Step 3: Looking to capitalize on the “discourse,” sports media starts talking about the Something, again, regardless of how stupid, unproven, non-sourced, etc it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s legitimate. All that matters is that it drives clicks/views/engagement. In case you can’t tell, this is the Step that disgusts me the most about my own industry. The fact that those of us in a position to help inform and entertain would ACTIVELY make people dumber for the almighty view/dollar is gross.

Step 4: Step 3 makes things get even BIGGER and it at times becomes a dominant narrative, which leads to many fans treating said narrative as fact/proven. This is where we’re at in the “Chiefs get all the calls” narrative.

Once you’ve hit Step 4, it doesn’t matter what is true or what is not. All that matters is the narrative. It’s being treated as a legitimate conversation, regardless of evidence (or lack thereof) that led to Step 1 getting off the ground.

I’ve spent untold amounts of hours over the last several months trying to engage with people regarding this “rigged” narrative, mostly because it’s so ludicrous (for a variety of reasons) that my assumption was all people needed was to hear legitimate statistics/examples in order to realize HOW ludicrous it is. After all, people care about truth, right? No one WANTS to be wrong about stuff… do they?

I should just be able to point people who believe that the NFL is rigged or biased towards the Chiefs to any of the following lines of thought:

• First and foremost, as broken down wonderfully by Taylor Witt of “It’s Always Sunny in Chiefs Kingdom,” the NFL actually has very little to gain and absolutely everything to lose by games being “rigged” for certain outcomes. In other words, for the “NFL is rigged” theory to be true, the NFL owners (not Goodell, who does not actually “run” the league but is rather essentially the proxy for the owners of the teams) would need to be willing to risk hundreds of billions to gain… well, virtually nothing (as the ratings of a single team don’t move the needle enough for television rights negotiations and would be only a marginal gain there). That is, on its face, patently absurd. This alone should be enough. Billionaires don’t risk billions to gain very little. Anyone arguing otherwise is demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how the NFL and its television rights income work.

• Second (and again, Taylor breaks this down well), in order for this “rigged” theory to be true, one would have to believe NFL refs are brilliant enough for it to not show up in statistical analysis. As has been covered exhaustively by Scott Kacsmar and Josh Dubow (you can find each of their profiles linked to their name here on Twitter), the Chiefs have been one of the most penalized teams in the league for years.

  

  People will cry back “ah, yes, that’s the brilliance” and pretend that a lack of evidence is, in fact, evidence. However… one must believe that NFL refs, whom we see make massive errors in EVERY SINGLE GAME, are somehow absurdly brilliant in this one specific area of rigging games. This, when the much simpler explanation of “NFL refs have an impossible job and often make mistakes” is right there. The other argument (it’s about the “when,” not the total stats) is one I’ll address shortly.

• Third, the amount of people involved for a “rigged” conspiracy would be nearly limitless. People pretend that an individual call is enough to rig a game, but the reality is that’s almost never true. The vast majority of games are decided over the course of multiple plays, all of which contain multiple moving parts. In order to actually rig the game, not only would ever official need to be in on it, but also key players, coaches, and the people who work with them every day (trainers, front office members), etc… That would be the level of cooperation needed to rig NFL games… and not a whisper of it ever coming out, despite people having every reason to blackmail the NFL with their knowledge that could kill the league. Again, this is absurd on its face when one considers the prior point regarding how little the league has to gain from this.

• Fourth, the anecdotal examples of calls that “won” games for the Chiefs are often incomplete. There’s the Bengals example discussed earlier (CIN’s pass interference call came only after a call against the Chiefs took away a Kansas City 1st down… a remarkably odd call if the game were “rigged”). As another example, many people try to point to a potential defensive pass interference (uncalled) by the Chiefs in the 4th quarter against the Falcons as proof of the game being rigged… but then fail to recall that said non-call, in fact, did NOT decide the game. Indeed, the Falcons ended up with the ball back with the same score and drove down the field aided by multiple penalties against the Chiefs (again, why do all this in a “rigged” situation when you could just not make bad calls against the team you’re rigging for?)… only to be stuffed on 4th down. But when all bad-faith people do is show a screenshot, others assume that the call (or non-call) decided the game when, in fact, it did not. The VAST majority of “Chiefs won because of the refs” calls that are discussed turn out this way when actually examined.

• Fifth, when people pivot to the “it’s the WHEN, not the amount of penalties” argument following statistical analysis showing no bias (at least honest statistical analysis, unlike the absurd “let’s look at only the last 11 playoff games of the Chiefs and ignore declined penalties and ignore formational and procedural penalties and ignore how clear called penalties were” tweet by Warren Sharp that recently made the rounds and was brilliantly debunked here), they ignore the evidence right in front of them by ignoring how calls go both ways in pivotal moments. The Chiefs were called on a weak hold on 3rd down of overtime of last year’s Super Bowl that kept the Niners from punting and saved their drive. An incredibly odd time for a penalty if it were rigged, no? Especially when the refs would have no way of knowing how the rest of the game would go! Further, for all the hand-wringing about subjective spot calls, multiple pivotal non-calls against the Bills in the AFC Championship aided them and hurt the Chiefs. In other words, the anecdotal arguments of “pivotal plays” doesn’t hold up when examining the most important games (by far) the Chiefs have played in the last year.

In sum… the league gets very little benefit from rigging for the Chiefs with incredible risk, it’s impossible to do without collusion from everyone involved, there’s no legitimate statistical analysis that shows proof of it (when actually done, again, just check Josh and Scott’s timelines or search “Chiefs” and “penalties” using their usernames with “from:” attached to see how thoroughly they dismantled the non-good-faith attempts to claim otherwise), AND anecdotal evidence from the most important games do not back it up. That should be sufficient, no? Pointing out the terrible calls that happen every week should be enough for people to realize that this is just how football works… right?

I thought it would be. And so I spent a great deal of time and energy trying to show people that they were, in fact, being taken for suckers by bad-faith actors trying to gain clicks or push an agenda.

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But I’ve been in Cancun for the last 5 days, and I’ve got a slightly different perspective now. First off, here’s some beautiful scenery to take in to bring you to my place of peace.

As I strolled the beaches in Cancun (shout out to all the Chiefs fans happy to exchange a “go Chiefs” with me), I ran into some football fans. And I had some great conversations with them about the whole “refs” issue. And one thing that I found, time and again, is that none of them had any information on the subject whatsoever. But you know what else I found? That even after getting the information that I have readily available (because, you know, it’s my job)… they don’t care.

Because right now, fans of other teams don’t WANT to know. They don’t WANT to understand that they’ve fallen victim to the worst of sports media. They want to believe that they’ve been cheated. They want to be angry. They want to resent Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, Travis Kelce, and a team fighting to be the greatest dynasty in the history of the league. And because of that, there’s nothing that will change their mind. No amount of data will suffice. The argument will simply shift aimlessly from one thing to the next, as the person will insist their belief must be “proven wrong” (ever try to prove a negative?) in order to not be true (a classic argument tactic known as flipping the burden of proof) and will immediately pivot to a knew (wrong) point as soon as one falls apart).

And understanding that, as I took in the beauty of Cancun along with 15 AFC teams, gave me a sense of peace. Of course opposing fanbases don’t want to believe that they’re witnessing greatness. Because that means they’re on the outside looking in. Do you remember that feeling? Before Mahomes, before the Chiefs became what they are today? It’s a bad feeling. And to push away bad feelings we often embrace the absurd.

And with that in mind, I’m out. Oh, sure, I’ll perhaps point people in the right direction of the statistics discussed about (mostly sending them to the threads I’ve linked to here, or to Josh and Scott’s timelines). But as of now, the information is out there. It’s widely available and free to access, and I don’t owe anyone more of my time and energy than pointing them in the right direction.

If a football fan isn’t aware that the Bills false started on their TD right before the half in the AFC Championship (which should’ve negated a CRUCIAL play, but didn’t)… it’s likely because they don’t want to know. They want to believe the absurd (a massive conspiracy involving thousands that benefits no one and is basically pointless and has no real evidence) over what they’ve known for years (football is an imperfect sport, games are won and lost over the course of many plays, and bad calls go both ways).

And you know what? That’s OK.

The NFL is at its best when it has a villain. Everyone loves to root for Goliath to be brought down, for The Empire to fall, for dynasties to crumble. It has always been this way in sports, and the greatness of the Chiefs won’t change that.

So Chiefs fans, you do whatever makes you happy when it comes to these absurd arguments. Use the information I’ve provided here. Argue all day if you like! But for me? I’ve given as much time as I’m willing to the absurd and am ready to embrace being the villain.

(Shout out to whomever first made this! You’re an inspiration to us all)

From now on, other than using the information everyone has available to troll people (or occasionally point a good-faithed but misguided person the right direction), I’ll simply be smiling and cracking a joke. I don’t owe anyone else anything more than that. My time is valuable, and it’s way more fun to review film and talk ball than it is to rehash the same old incorrect conspiracy takes over and over and over (and over).

I’ll be landing back home in Minnesota in a few hours, and over the next few days we’ll talk some football. But for now, Chiefs fans, let’s all smile and enjoy being the bad guy.