I Don’t Want To Hear Any Excuses, Apologies

You know, I was all set to write about a great trip my wife and I and plenty of other Platte Countians took last weekend to Dallas to see the Missouri Tigers take on former Big 12 rival Oklahoma State. It was a great time and ended with Mizzou pulling out a thrilling victory in the billion-dollar stadium known as Jerry’s World. It looks like that tale will have to be told in a future issue. Instead, I decided to weigh in on the latest Lucy-pulling-the-ball-away-from-Charlie-Brown chapter in the Kansas City Chiefs playoff history. I’m sorry if you’ve already had enough, have flushed the Chiefs and have moved on to brighter days. Please bear with me... There is only one word that is applicable to the Chiefs’ 45-44 loss to the Indianapolis Colts in the first round of the NFL playoffs last weekend. Inexcusable. That’s it. No excuses, no apologies. I don’t care how many injuries the Chiefs sustained during the game. I don’t care how great a season it was when considering that last year’s Chiefs team won just two games and left observers wondering how in the heck they managed even that pathetic record. I don’t want to hear it. The Chiefs led 38-10 in the third quarter of the game and lost, which was the second-biggest lead lost in playoff history. Once they built that lead, experts said the Chiefs had a 99.1 percent chance of victory. All this means of course is that Indy QB Andrew Luck said, “So you’re sayin’ there’s a chance!” Jim “Dumb and Dumber” Carrey would be proud. Just for fun, here are some more mind-numbing tidbits. The Chiefs scored the most points they have ever scored in a playoff game in their 51-year history and lost. Quarterback Alex Smith threw for more yards and more touchdowns than any signal-caller in Chiefs playoff history and lost. As an added bonus, Smith became the first quarterback in NFL history to lose a playoff game in which he threw four TD passes with no interceptions. The Chiefs led the turnover battle at plus-three and still lost. I’m not sure what the winning percentage of teams that is plus-three in turnovers in a playoff game, but I’m guessing it’s fairly high. Conversely, this means that the chances of a team losing such a game are fairly low. Of course, the Chiefs proved that they weren’t that low. Anyway, the loss was the Chiefs eighth straight playoff loss – an NFL record – dating back to January of 1994, when the Joe Montana-led Chiefs were pummeled at Buffalo in the AFC title game. This eighth straight postseason loss was also the fourth playoff loss during that span to the Colts. You may remember the first one at Arrowhead Stadium in 1996 when the Chiefs had the league’s best record and home field advantage throughout the playoffs. San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh was the Colts QB, the Chiefs insisted on throwing the ball despite the fact that the wind chill was 30-below-zero and Hall of Fame running back Marcus Allen was averaging five yards per carry and KC kicker Lin Elliott missed not one, not two but three field goals. The Chiefs lost 10-7. The other two playoff losses to the Colts prior to last Saturday’s punch in the gut came after the 2003 season when the Chiefs again had the league’s best record and home field advantage but couldn’t force the Peyton Manning-led Colts to punt a single time and in 2006 when the Chiefs backed into the playoffs on the last day of the season with an offense led by convicted woman-beater Larry Johnson. Expanding the frame a little wider, the Colts have now beaten the Chiefs 12 out of 14 times they have played in the last 20 years. So, evidently the Colts have the Chiefs’ number. Maybe that explains why they didn’t just roll over and play dead when the Chiefs went up by four touchdowns in the second half. And maybe that’s why all of us Chiefs fans knew that 28-point lead was not enough, even though statistics and history would indicate otherwise. A friend of mine forwarded me an online piece by former KC Star columnist Joe Posnanski that detailed his observations while watching the game. Posnanski, now a columnist for NBC Sports.com, only spent 15 years covering the Chiefs, but that was enough to know that that lead was not safe. Here’s what he said after the Colts cut the deficit to 10 points: “At this point, I must admit, I did not think the Chiefs were going to lose. I knew they were going to lose. That’s a terrible feeling isn’t it, when you KNOW something bad is about to happen but you still have to actually go through it? It’s that feeling when you have a bad report card but you haven’t yet shown it to your parents. The loss was certain. Now it was just a matter of watching it.” That’s exactly the way I felt as I watched the final quarter, which I must add, I watched on a small TV eight feet above my head in the waiting area of a Dallas-Fort Worth Airport terminal moments before I got on a plane Saturday night. So, when the Chiefs kicked a field goal to extend their lead to six points, I was hardly surprised that the Colts scored seven points on their next possession on a long TD pass to Indy’s best wide receiver that the KC secondary allowed to run right past them (do NFL safeties understand the meaning of the name of their position?). I was even less surprised when the Chiefs last gasp ended with troublesome wide receiver Dwayne Bowe getting only one foot inbounds on a catch that would have set the Chiefs up for a game-winning field goal. No surprise at all, really. The only thing that’s surprised me the past few days has been the sugar-coaters and apologists. “The Chiefs had so many injuries in that game,” they say. “Wow, the Chiefs won 11 games this year – who saw that coming,” they say. Like I said 850 words ago, I don’t care. Yes, the Chiefs lost one of the league’s premier offensive players five minutes into the game when Jamaal Charles went down. And then his backup – emerging running back Knile Davis – went down in the second half. That left the Chiefs with running back Cyrus Gray (sounds like a character from a John Grisham book, right?). And yes, the Chiefs lost one of their top defensive backs and second-best wide receiver and top pass rusher and ……. Whatever. They blew a 38-10 lead in the second half of an NFL playoff game. Unheard of? Pretty much. Inexcusable? No doubt. But, like I said, it’s not really surprising. When you’re a Chiefs fan, the light at the end of the tunnel is always an oncoming train. One of these days, we’re going to have to get off the damn tracks.