Stop! Please!
It didn’t take long after the Kansas City Chiefs edged the Buffalo Bills on Sunday night to advance to the Super Bowl for the ridiculous hyperbole to begin bubbling up like a clogged sewer.
On television, on radio, in print and just about anywhere else that football is discussed, the talk was the same:
“The Chiefs will become the first team to win three consecutive Super Bowls if they beat the Philadelphia Eagles!!â€
“The Chiefs can accomplish something never done!!â€
“The Chiefs can be peerless!!â€
Blah, blah, blah.
Can we for once not be caught up in the moment? Can we for once put some context into what is said or written?
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Yes, the Chiefs would be the first team to win three Super Bowls in a row. But ...
Despite its pompous name, the Super Bowl merely is the NFL championship game — and the Chiefs would NOT become the first team to win three successive titles. In fact, the Green Bay Packers did it twice.
ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ won the crown for the 1965, ’66 and ’67 seasons, and that spree includes the first two Super Bowls. (The National Football League champion began playing the American Football League winner in 1967, in what the time was called the “AFL-NFL Championship Game†before later being retroactively rebranded as the Super Bowl after that name was adopted in 1969.) And it’s not like the Packers’ pre-Super Bowl title in that run came before television was invented.
The Pack also reeled off three Depression-era NFL titles, in 1929, ’30 and ’31.
So if the Chiefs accomplish a “three-peat,†it actually will be the third time an NFL team has done so. That would be a monumental accomplishment for the team, no doubt. Just like their remarkable run of reaching seven consecutive AFC championship games, five of which they have won.
But ignoring what happened in the NFL before 1967 would be like Major League Baseball not recognizing the New York Yankees’ five consecutive World Series championships from 1949-53, the National Basketball Association dismissing the Boston Celtics’ remarkable eight-season title march (1959-66) or the National Hockey League being oblivious to the Montreal Canadiens’ five consecutive crowns (1956-60).
At least Kevin Harlan — a former Chiefs radio play-by-play announcer — was able to cut through the hype Sunday night as he wrapped up the national radio broadcast of the AFC title game that he had called on Westwood One, in which Kansas City defeated Buffalo 32-29.
He referred to Green Bay twice pulling the triple treat and said if the Chiefs match that, it will have been done “in the Super Bowl era.â€
Bravo. Unfortunately, don’t expect to hear that qualifier much over the next week leading into the Big Game on Feb. 9 in New Orleans. After all, this is the age of bravado, not context.
A Super bad, to some, stat
There still is much anger in the St. Louis area directed toward Rams owner Stan Kroenke for sabotaging the team during its latter years in town, compiling an inferior roster that led to abysmal seasons in order to bolster his cries of lack of local support and thus enhance his efforts to move the team back to Los Angeles. That plan was successful nine years ago this month, and many former fans of the team became even more incensed when he ripped the region on the way out of town.
Some St. Louisans also view the Chiefs as a villain in that equation because of the contribution of their owner, Clark Hunt, to the Rams’ exit from town. A proposal that the Chargers and Raiders, not Rams, would relocate to LA died when Hunt cast the only negative vote among the six submitted by the NFL’s stadium committee. That led to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones becoming instrumental in brokering the deal for the Rams and Chargers to be the teams that ended up moving.
But the number of St. Louisans miffed at the Chiefs is minuscule in comparison to those in the anti-Kroenke crowd, at least according to television ratings and KC merchandise sales in the Gateway City.
But those who still are incensed with both clubs are facing a difficult reality:
When the Chiefs meet the Eagles on Feb. 9, it will be the seventh consecutive Super Bowl in which at least one of those teams have played, with four titles in the six — three by Kansas City.
A big sendoff
CBS’ telecast of the Chiefs’ victory last Sunday drew an average of 57.7 million viewers, per a report by Front Office ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ, making it the most-watched AFC championship game in records dating to the 1980s.
KMOV (Channel 4) carried the game in St. Louis, and it was seen in 35.2% of the market, according to ratings tracking firm Nielsen. That’s the highest rating the Chiefs have received this season in the Gateway City, where all their games that haven’t been exclusively streamed have been shown. That rating also beat the figure that Kansas City’s AFC championship game appearance drew last year — 32.1
And it follows a surprising number for the Chiefs’ playoff opener a week earlier, when their contest against Houston that was shown on KDNL (Channel 30) and ESPN pulled a 19.2 combined rating. That was lower the team’s local number for its meaningless regular-season finale (19.3) and way below what their corresponding divisional-round game drew last year (31.9).
Factoring into the dip is that this year’s game was played on a Saturday afternoon, when TV viewership is not at its best, as opposed to having been in the peak early evening Sunday slot last season. Plus the opponent this time was Houston, not a glamour team. Last year the foe was Buffalo, which has developed into a big rival.