The Chiefs did it. They won a second Super Bowl in a row. They won a third Super Bowl under their current quarterback/head coach partnership. They launched themselves into Patriots-adjacent dynastic territory. They established breathing room between themselves and the rest of the recent NFL powers.
We were wrong, it turned out. We had the 49ers winning. And while we could whine a good deal about just how close it was and criticize Patrick Mahomes’s performance in most of regulation, there is a quality the Chiefs possess which we underestimated:
The Chiefs are very good at winning.
Winning is the whole thing, of course. Everything ties back to winning. Being good at anything in sports is, to some extent, being good at winning. But the Chiefs are good at grabbing wins when wins are on the table. The Chiefs are good at finishing the job. Since losing to the Patriots in overtime in that 2019 AFC Championship (one year after losing to the Titans by a point in Alex Smith’s final Chiefs start), Kansas City is 8–1 in one-score postseason games, a list that doesn’t even include the 2020 Super Bowl victory over these same 49ers, which Damien Williams turned into an eleven-point final margin. In total, the Reid–Mahomes combination is now 8–2 in one-score postseason games. This one was not the prettiest. But it may have been the most impressive.
The NFL is built to cycle teams in and out of success. Rookie contracts and salary caps and the parity-encouraging draft and the parity-encouraging schedules all function to make it easy for bad teams to turn things around and difficult for good teams to stay good. Battles to maintain NFL dynasties are not only fought against the rest of the league. They’re fought against the structure of the league itself, one which corners the Chiefs into a situation like yesterday’s: One in which they possess two of the three best players on the field (Mahomes, Chris Jones) and only three or four of the best ten. Kansas City’s offensive line played like paper in yesterday’s first half. Kansas City’s touchdowns were caught by Marquez Valdes-Scantling and a midseason castoff from the New York Jets. Even Travis Kelce, Mahomes’s primary offensive sidekick, was probably not the best tight end on the field, with George Kittle’s backbreaking blocking a hard thing to evaluate and an easy thing to underrate in evaluations of the league’s top players at the position. But Steve Spagnuolo frustrated Kyle Shanahan’s historic offense, and Chris Jones added a degree of difficulty to every pass Brock Purdy threw, and when the time came for someone to go win the ballgame, Mahomes re-arrived and did just that.
This was not quite George Foreman knocking out Michael Moorer at the age of 45, but it was closer to that than to prime Muhammad Ali. This was not the best Chiefs team we’ve seen in this era. It was probably the worst one they’ve had with Mahomes as the starting quarterback. But greatness is different from being the best. What the Chiefs accomplished yesterday in Las Vegas was not something the best teams always do. It was something great teams do.
Kyle Shanahan Is Still a Strength
Having our Iowa State relationship to Purdy, we wanted more for him, and while he made few bad plays, he didn’t go make a great play aside from the one where he put George Karlaftis on skates before connecting with Kyle Juszczyk late in the 49ers’ only overtime drive. Neither team played a spectacularly clean game (though both defenses were strong, something which can always make a game look ugly). Mahomes found a way. Purdy didn’t. We could have expected as much—Purdy is a good quarterback, not an all-time great—but once the Niners failed to put the Chiefs away, it became harder to not have that great player touching the ball every single play. Over a larger sample, being the better team—which we’ll maintain that the Niners were—is the good thing. Over a smaller sample, it might help to have the best individual quarterback the sport has…ever seen?
Kyle Shanahan is taking the broader share of criticism following the loss, and while there might be some fairness to it (taking the ball first or second in the new playoff overtime is a debatable debate, but players not knowing the new playoff overtime rules is a bad reflection on an organization), it’s an overreaction to a trio of individual losses, all three of which came against one of the best handful of quarterbacks to ever play the position, the kinds of players essential to those kinds of comebacks on that Super Bowl stage. We’ve said this before regarding Mike McCarthy: As it goes in college basketball, it’s easy to overreact to NFL playoff performance. And Kyle Shanahan is a much better coach than Mike McCarthy.
As plenty of others have pointed out, Andy Reid also used to have a beleaguered reputation because of a small sample of postseason defeats. There’s no reason to believe that Shanahan—similarly, an offensive innovator with a track record of elevating good players into all-league figures—won’t one day enjoy at least some echo of the transformation Reid’s reputation has undergone. There’s a lot of handwringing today about how eventually, the 49ers’ current stars will get too expensive or get too old. Would Deebo Samuel be as good as he is, though, had he not found a home in Kyle Shanahan’s offense? What about Purdy?
The 49ers, like the Chiefs, will have to deal with all the consequences the NFL’s system throws at success. But the 49ers have not gotten lucky. San Francisco’s won the NFC West in three of the last five years and has made the NFC Championship three years in a row. When things looked arguably the bleakest, the organization pulled a 7th-round draft pick out of obscurity and turned him into an MVP candidate That’s the kind of success which can weather some salary cap stresses.
The Rest
College basketball, including Iowa State:
- Arizona was the biggest winner of the weekend, turning around from surviving a three-overtime gauntlet at Utah to pummel Colorado on Saturday night in Boulder. It was one of the most surprising noteworthy results of the season, and it gets the Wildcats back in the 1-seed conversation, ahead of UNC and The SEC Three in the national championship picture.
- Kentucky is in a difficult place. The program is competent and competitive, but it is not competing for national championships, something Saturday’s loss in Lexington to an underwhelming Gonzaga team hammered home. To be fair, this was a game Gonzaga could prioritize to a degree Kentucky couldn’t. Gonzaga has some flexibility in game preparation in the WCC season, and Gonzaga’s stakes were higher than Kentucky’s. But the Wildcats are reeling, and it’s very realistic that this could be John Calipari’s last year in Camelot. The whole is less than the parts.
- Michigan State rallied its way back out of any bubble talk, outscoring Illinois 24–8 down the stretch to escape with a top-notch win. So far, Michigan State has appeared to be a team that can’t win games it shouldn’t, but one that’s capable and competitive. You can get to the Elite Eight that way with a break or two.
- Iowa State took a dangerous setup against TCU and made it routine, moving the ball well and limiting open looks as they held the Horned Frogs at bay all day. The Cyclones have a chance to tie Houston atop the Big 12 this week, playing Cincinnati while the Cougars get their weeknight break.
- It’s another fine Monday night, with Kansas on the road again (in Lubbock this time) and Duke hosting Wake Forest. This is Kansas’s third Saturday–Monday turnaround in four weeks. It’s Duke’s second in three.
Chicago:
- The Bulls lost close to the Magic, earning a chance to win it in regulation but losing in overtime. DeMar DeRozan settled for a long three as the fourth quarter ended. Not his best end-of-game possession. The Bulls are 16–13 in games decided by five points or less, which is 13th-best in the NBA but also 13th-best among the 24 teams within five games of the current Play-In Tournament cut lines. In other words, the close/late performance is fairly average from the Bulls. Maybe a little better than it should be, given their overall record, but nothing noteworthy. They’ve got the tenth-place Hawks tonight in Atlanta. Not sure how the tiebreakers break, but the Bulls lead the Hawks by one game going in.
- The Blackhawks extended their losing streak to six games but did pick up a point against the Rangers on Friday, coming back in the third period to force overtime. The Blackhawks don’t feel as bad as they are.
Four more:
- The coaching carousel is still settling out, but one shakeup late last week was Ryan Grubb reportedly agreeing to leave Alabama and take the Seahawks’ offensive coordinator job. Kalen DeBoer has plenty of options, but the loss of his right-hand man is a troubling development for the Tide.
- UCLA is going to replace Chip Kelly effectively from within, hiring back running back coach DeShaun Foster after Foster briefly took the Raiders’ running back coaching job earlier this offseason. The narrative UCLA’s leaning into with the hire is that the 44-year-old Foster is accepting the job with clear eyes, knowing what being a head coach is like these days in college football, and that the players love the guy and are excited to play under him. That’s a pretty good narrative. It was probably the right net to cast.
- Gary Patterson is back in a special assistant role, joining Dave Aranda’s staff at Baylor. It’s a funny move from Aranda, because it should absolutely help—Patterson has a lot of wisdom and enough modern experience (he was at TCU as recently as 2021) to be an asset—but there’s also a very capable interim in waiting if things start badly for the Bears. Ultimately, it’s the kind of move you want your head coach to make. Head coaches should coach to win. They shouldn’t coach to keep their jobs. This isn’t Congress. *ducks*
- As of now, the dates of consequence on the Dartmouth men’s basketball union front are: February 20th (deadline for Dartmouth to appeal the NLRB ruling, which is expected to happen); March 5th (when the players say they’ll hold their vote, three days before they finish what’s on track to be a last-place season in the Ivy League).
