The Chiefs can re-calibrate what Miami has long meant to franchise in Super Bowl LIV
For many, this dateline instantly conjures exotic images of sand and palm trees and pulsating nightclubs and Little Havana and cultural touchstones like Miami Vice.
To anyone with an allegiance to or affiliation with the Chiefs, though, word association with the mere name “Miami” long has been inseparable from an agonizing and pivotal episode in franchise history: their 27-24 double-overtime loss to the Miami Dolphins on Christmas Day 1971 in an AFC Divisional Round playoff game.
Now they stand on the cusp of rewiring that context and, in fact, the modern identity of the team when they play the San Francisco 49ers here in Super Bowl LIV.
For at least the week ahead, Miami means only opportunity and hope for a team and fan base seeking its first championship in half a century.
For that matter, in a season marked by some twists of fate that forever have seemed to elude the Chiefs, the path back was made all the more navigable by Miami upsetting New England in what center Austin Reiter called “a late Christmas present.”
Reiter meant just four days late when he referred to the Dec. 29 turn that enabled the Chiefs to secure a No. 2 playoff seed and a playoff bye week — one of a number of improbable scenarios this season that unfolded favorably for Kansas City.
But the “late Christmas” notion might be more meaningfully thought of as 48 years overdue, especially considering all the heartache and misadventures that ensued in the intervening span.
It speaks symbolically to two generations of futility that the Dolphins game was the very first in the consciousness of Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, who was 5 years old when his father’s team was bestowed with that lump of coal that kept on giving. He doesn’t remember attending Super Bowl IV in 1970.
Christmas Day sadness
Even if you weren’t specifically attuned to that Dolphins game, you came to understand its relevance through the tone it set for unspeakable playoff debacles to come … and a fan base so often left to love its team despite instead of because.
As it happens, though, the end of innocence for the franchise playing in its last game at Municipal Stadium was seared into the memories of many.
Like that of actor and comedian David Koechner, then 9, whose fidelity to the team began that day watching with family in his grandmother’s living room in Tipton, Missouri.
That game “didn’t turn out right,” Koechner said during a recent interview with The Star, jokingly adding, “Because the Dolphins cheated. A lot of people don’t know that.”
A lot of people do know this: That game was a marathon, though it’s somewhat of a misnomer that it remains characterized as the longest in NFL history: The record 82 minutes, 40 seconds of game clock played out in 3 hours, 21 minutes, which is common in today’s commercial-flooded version of the NFL.
But it’s no exaggeration to say its impact was interminable and indelible on an organization that from the 1962 to the 1969 seasons had won three AFL titles and reached two of the first four Super Bowls.
In their second appearance 50 years ago, the Chiefs smothered Minnesota 23-7 to hint at more ahead as the AFL entered full-on into the merger with the NFL.
Instead …
“It was an inflection point that really shows how the core of what you think you have, once it tilts, it can be tilted for a very … long … time,” Willie Lanier, a Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker and leader of those teams, said in a recent interview with The Star. “So I think if anything, sports gives you a reference of trying to define what it took to be successful and what does it take to recover from not being successful.”
In this case, the beginning of a new era with the move to Arrowhead Stadium was belied by a core group aging out of its prime without adequate replenishment after being on the verge of dynasty.
Some, such as the late Bill Richardson, who covered the Chiefs for The Star from the time they arrived in 1963, considered that team to be their best.
If not for a quirky brew of three missed field goals by the superb Jan Stenerud (a hero of Super Bowl IV and revolutionary force in the evolution of the game) and four turnovers and the stellar defense being unable to keep Miami out of the end zone in the final minutes with a 24-17 lead, the game might be remembered most for Ed Podolak’s 350 all-purpose yards.
It might have been a runway to a third Chiefs Super Bowl among the league’s first six.
Instead, with the rest of pro football catching up in such ways as at last scouting historically black colleges and universities, the franchise’s trajectory changed abruptly.
After they went 20-21-2 over the next three seasons, legendary coach Hank Stram was fired. The Chiefs went 16-42 the next four seasons.
By the time they made it back to the playoffs, it was 15 years after the Christmas Day loss. By the time they won their next playoff game, two decades had elapsed since the fateful defeat.
Then things really got tough, with a spree of can’t-make-that-up-type postseason losses … over another 20-plus-years without a playoff win between the 1993 and 2015 seasons.
Reid’s hire starting point
But despite suffering a couple of those numbing losses himself, the truth is that the Chiefs’ prospects were shifting beneath them with the hiring of Andy Reid after the 2012 season as the 12th successor to Stram.
Even as the Chiefs were adding to their spectacular playoff calamities with that cave-in at Indianapolis, etc., a stable baseline was forming that would be given true life with the arrival of Patrick Mahomes in the 2017 draft.
It might have played out differently, of course. The Chicago Bears could have seen something in Mahomes when they traded up from third to second to select … Mitch Trubisky. Moreover, eight other teams could have picked Mahomes, and all others could have tried to trade up for the chance to select him as the Chiefs did 10th overall.
Instead, the Chiefs suddenly had the sort of player everyone else would later covet in an ideal situation both with quarterback whisperer Reid and starter/mentor Alex Smith.
By the time Mahomes became the full-time starter last season, it was almost immediately evident he was the sort of presence that could change the course of modern history for the Chiefs.
That was only further affirmed through a season in which he earned NFL Most Valuable Player honors and was essential to the Chiefs’ closest brush with a Super Bowl since 1970 before their 37-31 overtime loss to New England in the AFC Championship Game last year.
That loss hurt but ultimately was galvanizing, both in terms of motivation for the returnees and monumental changes to be made on the defense with the hiring of Steve Spagnuolo and the acquisitions of Tyrann Mathieu, Frank Clark and others.
Then something else started to happen this season: For the first time since forever, the Chiefs got breaks.
Chiefs healthy now
In a season marred by injuries, they’ve never been healthier than the last few weeks.
When Mahomes crumpled on the turf in Denver with a dislocated kneecap, many immediately feared the worst. Instead, he was back a few weeks later … and maybe even benefited from the time off to heal up an ailing ankle he’d aggravated a few times.
Along the way, some head-scratching losses (like a late-season Houston loss at Denver) helped shape the Chiefs’ seeding.
But nothing as overtly as Miami upending New England, by that familiar 27-24 score, in a rematch of a game the Dolphins had lost 43-0 earlier in the season.
“Man, football gods (are) looking out for us,” receiver Sammy Watkins said after the Chiefs beat the Chargers that day, adding, “To have the Dolphins beat the Patriots, you know we’re living right; we’re doing right over here.”
That day Reid couldn’t resist saying “hail to the Dolphins” in the opening remarks of his postgame news conference.
Right on time to put to rest the 1971 flail to the Dolphins that hovered for so long.
The Chiefs then seemed to purge their history of playoff misery when they rallied from a 24-0 deficit to beat Houston 51-31. Then they made that all the more resonant with a 35-24 win over Tennessee, their foe at home after the Titans upset top-seeded Baltimore.
Now there’s a chance to make Miami synonymous with not just the beginning of a bleak time in franchise history, but also with a rebirth.
“I’m looking forward to blotting that (Dolphins memory) out with what we’re going to do in Miami in a couple of weeks,” Hunt said after the Chiefs earned their trip here.
This story was originally published January 28, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "The Chiefs can re-calibrate what Miami has long meant to franchise in Super Bowl LIV."