How good the Kansas City Chiefs happen to be is getting borderline annoying for me to even talk about anymore. While it’s true that two of my favorite things about life involve patting myself on the back when I do some cool shit, and celebrating in the misfortunes of people I don’t like, it really isn’t my style to gloat about the sports teams I love — especially the great ones. Occasionally I have to be the adult in the room and draw some of the shitkicker NFL fans back towards reality, but in general I treat football the way it is meant to be treated: As the only thing in the world that matters.
In all honesty, you would be hard-pressed to find a more magnanimous fan of the best football team on the planet than me. That is the only fair word to describe who I am. The reason this is so has nothing to do with Kansas City, though. It has to do with the small universe of everyone else’s favorite team (or “teams”? Whatever). Whether it’s the Chargers or the Raiders, the 49ers or the Eagles, the Steelers, the Packers, the Lions, whoever, I will be the first guy to be overly agreeable with the glass-half-full takes that my friends have about the prospects for their teams’ futures (or “future” in the singular form? This is getting confusing).
And I can do this, you know, because I have the knowledge that if their favorite team was matched up with my favorite team, home, away, or on a neutral field, the Chiefs would be favored to win. I don’t even have to argue anymore about Patrick Mahomes being the best player in the NFL. I don’t have to prove any points about Kansas City being the best. Of all the tired and boring it’s-not-even-worth-it-to-bring-it-up-because-we-know-it-will-lead-to-a-petty-disagreement-or-argument topics in 2023 — which seems to be pretty much everything nowadays — it brings me warmth to know there is still one universal truth: In the NFL there’s the Chiefs, and there’s everyone else.
There was a time not so long ago when the Chiefs were kind of being looked down on by fans and media types, because they traded one of the best players in the league — Tyreek Hill — to the Dolphins, and there were questions about what Mahomes would look like and how the Chiefs offense would operate without him. This was a real discussion being had circa this time of the year, 2022, before anyone knew anything.
I am the furthest thing from someone who exudes optimism when it comes to my sports teams; I tend to be more comfortable expecting the worst and being proved wrong. (This is a lifestyle philosophy more than anything.) But with last season’s team, enough was enough. The pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction. So before the year I staked my claim, put my dick on the table, and wrote that I am going into this season with the expectation that the Chiefs are going to win their second Super Bowl, and anything less will be a disappointment. Furthermore I not only posited an entire article stating that the Chiefs were going to beat the Bengals in the AFC Championship, but that they would then go on to defeat the Eagles in the Super Bowl.
These bold-ish wishful-thinking-inspired proclamations are not in any way shape or form embedded in my character because, like I said, I am not the blind sports fan guy that you witness every time you hear some random talk about a subject that includes two teams and a ball. But the crazy thing was, all of my predictions actually happened. In real life. I wouldn’t recommend for anybody to trust my opinions regarding sports, and at the same time I am arguing that, in a way, you should trust me, for I go to impossible lengths to be as objective as I possibly can about the NFL, where objectivity about one’s favorite team can be (and is) incredibly difficult. I’ll be pounding the table to bet against the Chiefs when it comes to the point spread most weeks — since the number is generally inflated — yet when push comes to shove I’ll also be the one to say they are that team to believe in when it matters the most.
As a generic sports fan and not some super serious football scout, or whatever, I am not going to waste any time this year writing a preview article about what I think about the Chiefs offense or defense. I’ll give you a couple hints, though: the offense is going to be fucking good, because Patrick Mahomes still plays quarterback for them, and the defense will probably be about average. I don’t have a strong opinion about them going over or under their 11.5-win expectation according to the betting markets, but I imagine they will be right there with the other juggernauts in the AFC come playoff time.
The only thing I found — and find, since it is still ongoing — particularly interesting about Kansas City’s offseason has to do with defensive tackle Chris Jones, who remains in the midst of a month-and-a-half-long holdout where he is losing $50,000 per day and something like $1 million per every preseason game he missed. All told, should Jones refuse to report before Thursday’s season opener against the Detroit Lions it will cost him north of $6 million in fines.
Chris Jones wants a new contract. That is all that’s happening. He is currently entering the final year of a 4-year, $80 million deal he agreed to after the Chiefs won their first Super Bowl in 50 years against the San Francisco 49ers in 2019. In the NFL, however, star players rarely play on the lame duck season of their contract, for they seek the security of a longer-term deal to protect them against injury, underperformance, or things of the like.
It is one of the most fascinating holdouts in recently memory since both sides — Chris Jones, and the Kansas City Chiefs organization — feel they have the leverage on their side. This is what makes the current situation such a sticky one. Jones is almost universally considered the second-best player at his position in the league; he was recently voted the 10th-best player in the NFL by his peers. The Chiefs, meanwhile, just banked their second Super Bowl in four years. From their perspective, they don’t have to pay anybody who isn’t named Patrick Mahomes.
Chris Jones is a fucking animal at defensive tackle. The attention he receives on each snap frees up every other player on the defensive line to have one-on-one matchups; the holes he creates allow the linebacker unit to fire past the line to make tackles, or frees them up to attack on blitzes; the pressure he generates means there is less time for the Chiefs secondary to guard opposing receivers, where more time equals more opportunities for those receivers to get open.
In every conceivable way Chris Jones is the Chiefs defense. Without him, they don’t go. The most regrettable aspect of his holdout is that, with him on the field occupying space, Kansas City has the chance to be one of the 10- or 12-best defensive units in the NFL. Without him, that number probably craters to somewhere in the 20’s. I say it with zero exaggeration: Jones is critical to this franchise’s ability to repeat as world champions.
From the front office’s vantage point, in a sense they are playing with house money. Again, this organization has already produced two championships in Mahomes’s first five year’s at quarterback. You would be a simpleton if you assumed they didn’t feel some level of arrogance, or comfortability, with such a wind blowing at gale force behind them. Bob Seger once wrote a song about love called Against The Wind, where he said iconically and tragically that “[I] wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then,” but with the Chiefs it’s the opposite. They have already climbed the mountain. Multiple times.
And they have this weird thing about them where Patrick Mahomes, who during the same offseason Chris Jones signed his second contract Mahomes received a 10-year, $500 million extension, is actually four years later only the 7th-highest paid QB in the league on a per-year basis. Travis Kelce, who is crucial to the offense and the team’s surefire number one receiver, is only the 4rd-highest paid tight end despite being arguably the best in history at his position.
This is not necessarily relatable to Chris Jones’s dispute, but it should offer some clarity into how management views the labor. The front office can contend that Mahomes is taking less money than he is worth because he wants to win. Kelce is taking less money than he is worth because he wants to win. Who are you, Chris Jones, to demand market value?
I happen to love Chris Jones, and I want him to get paid every penny he feels that he is worth. As a fan of the Chiefs, I am aware that Jones’s inclusion on this roster gives Kansas City a better chance to win the Super Bowl not only this year, but in 2024 and 2025 as well.
But the Chiefs are playing a different game than I, as a fan, care about. They are betting not on what Chris Jones has already produced, but on what he will produce in the years ahead. From their end, it is bad business to pay for what has already happened. That story has already been written. And it has been a very profitable, happy story for them.
It is my hope that Jones gets paid. It is my hope that the Chiefs win another Super Bowl in 2023. But more than anything I just want to enjoy it, the team, the season, everything that comes with it. Last year I was so self-absorbed with my own shit that I didn’t get to appreciate the second half of the football season as much as I should have. By the time the playoffs came and went every game felt like I was merely holding on. When the Chiefs ultimately beat the Eagles in the Super Bowl, I celebrated with a sigh of relief in lieu of a certain childlike happiness the moment called for. It didn’t take more than a day or two before all those happy feelings wore off and I was back in my own head, again, for the long haul.
I think I knew I was getting back to being myself about a month ago, because finally I started going on YouTube again just to watch meaningless highlights, consume the pointless banter and minutia. I began listening to football podcasts again. I can never like turn my brain completely off or stop being who I am, with all the good and bad that comes with that. But I am well aware that the more time I spend filling my head with nonsense such as the NFL to distract me from myself, the better off I am.
Every football season is its own campaign. I consume sports a little differently than most because as a quasi-gonzo journalist I make myself the epicenter of whatever happens to occur during the Kansas City Chiefs continuous march to the promised land. That’s probably why every year I find myself in the doldrums of the NFL offseason watching and re-watching highlights from meaningless September and October games, remembering players who caught touchdown passes or broke off 40-yard runs, even though they no longer play for the Chiefs and have long been gone by that point.
Football has a way of holding up a mirror to my life, where every game reminds me where I was, or the people who were occupying my day-to-day experience who, too, are no longer there. It doesn’t show up in the stat sheets or the highlight reels. It exists only in my mind, or when I look at a worn and tattered novel on my bookshelf, or when I smell the air change from summer to autumn, and again from autumn to winter.
And these months go so fast. I guess that’s what that old saying about time flying is all about. It is here, and then it’s not.
Future Bets 
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