There was a time when the Kansas City Chiefs were the feel-good story of the NFL. A young, electric quarterback taking over the league. A lovable, mustachioed head coach finally getting his due. A franchise that had spent decades in irrelevance now standing at the pinnacle of football. But success has a funny way of shifting narratives. Now? The Chiefs aren’t just winners—they’re villains. Insufferable showboaters. Annoying billionaire romancers. At least, that’s what their growing legion of critics would have you believe. The calls always seem to go their way. Their wins come with an asterisk. And just like the Patriots before them, their dominance has made them the team everyone loves to hate.
The Chiefs are now often looked at as “the hedge fund kids” of the league by many of their haters. Let’s face the reality: Many NFL fans don’t want to see the Philadelphia Eagles win the Super Bowl as much as they want Patrick Mahomes’ Chiefs to lose it. Isn’t it? Well, that’s what sports commentator Dan Patrick thinks too. During Friday’s episode of his show, Dan Patrick played the audio of Travis Kelce from New Heights, where the Chiefs’s tight end embraced being a villain in the Super Bowl. Villain? Yes! A new term that the Chiefs have no choice but to embrace nowadays, after controversial officiating calls and (baseless?) rigging accusations. But are they really villains?
Let’s dig into what a villain is first. Dan Patrick tried to define it by saying, “A villain is a character or person who is intentionally evil or harmful to others. Villains can be fictional or based on real people.” So, can we now categorize the Chiefs as bad boys? According to him, the question is about “the intentional part of that, are they intentionally evil? Are they intentionally good or great? I think they came along at a time we were like, yes, somebody other than the Patriots. And then all of a sudden, it’s like, now we’re waiting for somebody other than the Kansas City Chiefs. But I mean, Patrick Mahomes, not a villain. (Travis) Kelce, Andy Reid, Chris Jones. I don’t get it. I think we’re tired of the story.”
Interestingly, Patrick made a distinction between the two dynasties here. While confirming that both the Chiefs and Patriots are rightly perceived as getting favorable calls at their peak, he threw some shade at the Tuck rule incident, or should we say, the Tom Brady rule. “But it’s not their fault. You know, if they take advantage of the rules, then change the rules. You know, the Patriots, you could say were villains because they cheated. And they were involved in a couple of nefarious situations there. Their head coach wasn’t likable. Brady, we embraced because it was an underdog story.”
With this thought, he expressed that when Tom Brady and New England were winning it all multiple times, they were also seen as villains or cheaters. Many NFL fans were tired of seeing them winning the title again and again. The same is the case with Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs! Explaining it, the host pointed out, “And that’s natural for sports fans. It’s like, okay, somebody else. Boy, we’re really rooting for Buffalo. Or we’re, we’re rooting against Kansas City because we want somebody else in there. Buffalo would be great. Baltimore would be great. We want somebody else in there. This happens with dynasties. We get tired, same stories, same people.”
Hence, unlike many other critics, the sports commentator sees the team that Andy Reid has built as “…one of the great teams of all time. With what they’ve done this run, Mahomes and what he’s done, historical.” He doesn’t buy the narrative of the refs helping the Chiefs in the games. The allegations are of such a volume that even a former NFL executive chimed into this, clearing the air on officiating bias accusations.
Are fans a factor in Patrick Mahomes’ Chiefs success?
After the Chiefs entered the Super Bowl for the third consecutive year, social media went into a frenzy accusing Patrick Mahomes’ team of being favored by refs. They even slammed the NFL and its commissioner, along with the team. After all, who makes money when the Chiefs register record merchandise sales or millions tweet about Taylor Swift’s every move in the box? But are they really getting help from refs to win games?
Former NFL senior vice president of officiating, Dean Blandino, is no stranger to all the noise out there. Hence, he stepped up to clarify some points. During his appearance this week on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio, Blandino highlighted that none less than his own brother thinks the league is indeed rigged. He pointed out, “My brother, who is convinced that the league is rigged, that is convinced that I signed an NDA when I left the league office, that I cannot tell anybody that it is rigged because I was the head of officiating.” But in reality, as per the exec, “There’s no conspiracy. The officials, there’s too many variables, there’s too much going on. It’s the hardest sport to rig when you think about football with seven different officials.”
That’s a valid point! If there is some big plan for a team to lead them to win, then keeping things under wraps would be tough with so many different people in the picture. Nevertheless, we all know what we’ve seen with our own eyes. The stats reflect this too, as the Chiefs ranked 4th in the regular season for penalties suffered. The fact that the league didn’t announce any fines for the two controversial flags in their Texans playoff game only added fuel to the fire. But none of this will ever be black and white.
The only fact here is that this debate might not be suppressed until some other team comes and wins. And perhaps that if the Chiefs three-peat, some critics will be convinced for life that the NFL is rigged. Will the Eagles do themselves, the NFL, and perhaps (indirectly) even the Chiefs’ legacy a favor?
