Chiefs Fans Doing the "War Chant" After Beating the Worst Team in the League by Two is the Most Pathetic Thing I've Ever Seen From Any Fanbase

I gotta tell you, I’m genuinely disgusted!

Today the Kansas City Chiefs, the two-time defending Super Bowl champions, were on their home field when the Las Vegas Raiders, the worst team in the league, lost a game. The game was lost by the Raiders because they are a pathetic franchise that finds all-new ways to win, coached by a guy who has no business coaching an NFL team. You can make your case that the New York Giants or Jacksonville Jaguars are worse, but you’d be wrong. The Raiders don’t have a bad team, they have an entirely bad operation, from top to bottom. This is a team that went into the season saying “Yes, Gardner Minshew and Aidan O’Connell, good enough” at the most important position in sports. They are a perennially cursed franchise. And so, no surprise, they came into tonight’s game tied for the least wins in football. If there is any team that you’re supposed to beat and beat with ease and authority, in the NFL, it’s the Raiders. Yet the two-time defending Super Bowl champions once again struggled against clearly inferior competition, watching O’Connell repeatedly attack their overrated secondary, winning with Las Vegas in field goal territory because their center pulled a Raiders; he snapped the ball to O’Connell well before the rest of the offense was ready, resulting in a fumble that handed the Chiefs the ball and the win.

This was all quite annoying. Andy Reid punted from his opponent’s 37-yard line tonight. The football gods should never reward such cowardice.

Anyway: Chiefs fans at Arrowhead Stadium responded to this performance, which was more embarrassing than most NFL losses, by doing their stupid and racist war chant. The whole tomahawk chop deal. Which is really stupid and gross. If you claim that your team is the best in the league - and trust me, they do - and you beat the worst team in the league, you don’t take that as an opportunity to celebrate with your bigoted theatrics! A win’s a win, in the standings. But you should be embarrassed for your franchise, that this is what it’s been reduced to. If your fanbase is a Real Hardcore Lunchpail Working Class Salt of the Earth Heartland of America fanbase, as Chiefs fans constantly insist, you should know enough to not party in the streets after such a win. Of course, if 80% of the fans in the stadium became Chiefs fans in the past seven years, maybe that would explain it…. This is a fanbase that insists that it embodies the purest and best the NFL has to offer, with a lot of self-aggrandizing talk about how their all Real Fans who know the game better than anyone. So why are you acting like you just upset the undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl? What’s with the confetti? The goddamn Las Vegas Raiders just took your team to the brink. You should feel sheepish.

The Chiefs have this band of incredibly defensive stans, in the media, that reacts violently to any mention of the team’s unimpressive statistical profile. There is, of course, Nick Wrong, who embraced a “overconfident guy who sneers at everyone else” persona for his sports shouting career but now finds himself plying that persona while rooting for a dominant dynasty, which leaves him acting like an absolutely insufferable asshole. (I actually don’t think he’s an insufferable asshole, really, but he started playing that character years ago and now he feels like he can’t get out, tragic really.) But there’s also the Schwartzes, Mitchell and Geoff, two retired offensive lineman (and brothers maybe 🤔) who have parlayed their Twitter feeds into post-NFL careers as analysts; if you suggest that perhaps the Chiefs as currently constituted have a less-than-dominant statistical profile, that maybe it matters that they’re so much worse than their 2019 or 2022 teams, they’ll drop a twenty-tweet thread about how you’re a meanie. And then there’s Trey Wingo, formerly of ESPN, who appears to literally go through Twitter search results looking for anyone expressing skepticism about this year’s Kansas City team so that he can throw a fit about it. It’s very weird.

Here’s the thing about actually dominant teams: they don’t inspire that kind of defensive, whiny-ass behavior.

The thing about analytics is that you either embrace them or you don’t. And analytics tells us, among other things, that the Chiefs have been - mathematically, objectively - remarkably lucky during their dynasty, as the above video demonstrates. And analytics also tells us that the Chiefs do not produce explosive plays, which was once their calling card and is important for winning championships. They simply can’t attack down the field, which is so bizarre if you remember that classic game against the Rams on Monday Night Football. Meanwhile, one of the most basic observations that analytics has given us is that point differential is a better predictor of postseason success than win-loss record. The Chiefs have the third-best point differential in their own division. And yet if they’re not number one in everyone’s power rankings, their sycophants in the media will have an absolute meltdown. Their vaunted defense, legitimately great last year, has lost a step. They just haven’t been a great team this year! That’s a fact! We are allowed to accurately report the stats that reflect that reality. But you’d never know that based on their media coverage.

Once upon a time, Patrick Mahomes was throwing bombs down the field and they were putting up 50-point games and they were blowing teams out, doing the sort of things you’d like to see a dynasty-quality team do. They were fun. Now, Mahomes has been reduced to the role of a checkdown artist, throwing endless slants and tight end comebacks and wide receiver screens, frequently overthrowing the rare deep shots he takes. Pair that with Andy Reid’s absurd (and seemingly intensifying) conservatism as a coach - he’s the king of the 4th and 1 field goal from the opponent’s 17 - and the Chiefs are a painful team to watch, now. These past few years have ended in championships, and that’s all that matters from a team standpoint. Neither I nor anyone else would be surprised if this year ended in yet another Chiefs standpoint too. (Dynasties ruin sports, and the NFL has been trapped in dynasty hell for twenty-five years, but nevertheless.) However, in my opinion the Chief’s remarkable offensive slowdown has absolutely impacted Mahomes’s claim to being the greatest of all time. I was once quite confident that he would pass Tom Brady in that regard. But speaking as no fan of the Patriots at all, I no longer feel that way. Brady has a four-ring lead on Mahomes, and he won both of their playoff matchups, including a dominant Super Bowl victory. To make up ground, Mahomes has to be the kind of statistical marvel he was early in his career, and he just hasn’t been that for several years. You’re just not going to get GOAT status piling up these years with touchdowns in the 20s and a passer rating in the 90s. You’re just not.

Here’s the thing about Chiefs fans: they root for the Yankees and pretend they root for the Marlins. They root for the Lakers and pretend they root for the Hornets. In the past 25 years, the Chiefs have averaged about 9 wins a season, which is a high number. In the past 10 years, the Chiefs have averaged 11.7 wins a season, an absolutely wild number. They’ve been a great team. And yet you would never know it, to listen to them. They constantly complain about being disrespected. They talk about themselves like a beleaguered fanbase, despite being the opposite. They combine two impulses that are bad on their own and even worse together: the entitlement of supporting a dominant team with the sense of grievance that comes from supporting a perpetual doormat. It’s not fun to deal with! Look, when a team puts a dynasty together, a ton of new fans show up. That’s sports, that’s how it goes. And the incumbent fans can’t control that. But you’d like them to be gracious in their good fortune; you’d like them to acknowledge that they’re the rich kids of the NFL world and show a little noblesse oblige. You’d like for them to understand what Yankees fans and Lakers fans and Cowboys fans know, as supporters of fairweather teams: everyone else is going to hate you, and that’s just the price of your success. Well, you are the Yankees now, Chiefs fans. You are the Lakers. Maybe you should get around to accepting that fact, and stop demanding that everybody go easy on you. Everybody hates you. That’s the price of victory.

Chiefs fans, in a word, are crybullies.

Oh, by the way: an official blew the Raiders final play dead; even though it was an erroneous whistle, that’s supposed to be the end of the play, no fumble recovery. You can even see Raiders players react to the whistle. So, yes, once again, the refs hand a game to the Chiefs. You can enjoy the win, Chiefs fans, but you have to start being honest about this team and the dynasty. I’m a Bears fan; I live in the house of forever sadness. But there’s dignity in that, and there’s no dignity in doing your shitty war chant because your team just barely squeaked out a fluky win over Aidan O’Connell.