Remember to enjoy what you have before it’s gone.
As an outsider looking in, the success of the Kansas City Chiefs since the beginning of the Andy Reid era, and more so since the beginning of the Patrick Mahomes era, has been incredible to watch.
Five straight conference championships played in Kansas City, three Super Bowl appearances in four years, with at least one (we’ll see how today goes) win. Seven straight playoff appearances with more than 10 wins in each of those seasons.
It’s been an incredible run.
I know you all don’t need reminding. You were there for the 10-38 stretch across three years in the late 2000s, you were there in 2014 when the offense played a full season without a receiver catching a touchdown. Many of you were there through the ’70s and ’80s when a 10-win season was a dream.
I get it, there have been a lot of bad times in Chiefs history, which is exactly why you might need a gentle reminder to enjoy what you have now.
It’s not a reasonable ask, but try not to get overly stressed if there are a couple of mistakes today, there probably will be. Try not to overlook that you have the best quarterback, and arguably the best coach, in football locked up for a long time, there should be more great times to come.
But you never know.
I’m a longtime Seahawks fan and most of my fan lifetime has been a pretty remarkable stretch of at least regular-season success. But the Chiefs are already in a far superior run than the Seahawks 2000s and early 2010s stretch.
I didn’t think it would end when the Seahawks went to back-to-back Super Bowls and looked set to win a second in a row. Then it unraveled incredibly quickly.
It hasn’t been a terrible stretch, they’re still usually above .500, they’ve made the playoffs all but two years since the lost Super Bowl, but they also haven’t made it past the divisional round and have been one-and-done in the playoffs three times. It’s pretty easy to go from remarkable all-time team to mediocre with some level of success.
You’ve got an incredible team, an incredible coach and an incredible quarterback whose half-billion dollar contract is only going to look more and more team friendly as the quarterback market continues to pass by him the next nine years and the salary cap continues to raise.
It seems like it might be hard for the Chiefs to really fall off their trajectory as long as Mahomes and Reid are around. They have weathered the loss of multiple offensive coordinators -- and who knows if Eric Bieniemy will ever get a head-coaching offer to take him out of Missouri -- and a defensive coordinator in Reid’s time at the helm. They weathered issues with one of the top receivers in the league leading to an offseason trade and still held the top spot in the league in both offensive points and yards this season.
There’s been so much success, especially after major transitions, it can become easy to forget that sooner or later everything ends.
So enjoy what you have while it’s here.
You get to watch your team play in another Super Bowl today, you get to watch an amazing young quarterback continue to dominate the league for years to come, doing things on the football field we’ve never seen before and making the incredible exceedingly ordinary while working an offense built by a play-calling genius.
The Chiefs have made football look really easy the past few years. They have controlled the AFC to the point of calling the AFC Championship Game the “Kansas City Invitational.”
But football isn’t easy, teams learn and grow and will eventually figure out a way to catch up. Sooner or later the AFC championship won’t be in Kansas City, and sooner or later you’re going to be thinking back about the good ol’ days of the 2010s and early 2020s Chiefs.
So just remember when you’re stressed getting ready to watch the game today, you’re watching one of the best stretches of team play in a long time and you should enjoy it while its here.
Because sooner or later, it won’t be.