By Bryan S

I am a Kansas City Chiefs fan. It’s almost embarrassing to say it out loud. After a life-long love affair, I’m sick of their shit. It is important to note, I’m a pure fan. There’s no bandwagon bullshit here—not that the Chiefs have ever accomplished anything bandwagon worthy. I was indoctrinated, as were my siblings, at birth by our father. My mom has a picture of me at my first birthday party blowing out a candle protruding from a Chiefs cake. I’m wearing a little Chiefs t-shirt. Though I’ve been a fan since birth, my memory of the team really kicks in during the early 90s. I barely remember Steve DeBerg. I more remember Dave Krieg. I definitely remember Steve Bono. No matter who was the former backup quarterback lucky enough to lead our once-storied franchise through, yet, another mediocre season, Sundays have always been a priority in my life. I have been scheduling my life around watching football since before I even knew what that meant. And for as long as I’ve been wasting time and energy on these assholes in red, I have never seen them put together a complete roster, a roster that strikes fear into the black hearts of the many or even the few.

Sure, Marty Schottenheimer built a juggernaut of a defense that carried us through the incredibly disappointing 90s. Dick Vermeil, apparently the yang to Schottenheimer’s yin, took over as head coach for most of the aughts. Vermeil’s team was the polar opposite of Schotty’s: all offense and no defense, but Vermeil’s lopsided roster, while way more fun to watch and way more fun to play on Madden than Schottenheimer’s old school crew, managed the same soul-torturing results. Why have the Chiefs been so disappointing over the last few DECADES? I think I have an idea.

Read this list and tell me what you think.

Bill Kenney

Todd Blackledge

Steve DeBerg

Dave Krieg

Joe Montana

Steve Bono

Elvis Grbac

Rich Gannon

Trent Green

Damon Huard

Brodie Fucking Croyle

Tyler Thigpen

Matt Cassel

Tyler Palko

Brady Quinn

Kyle Orton

Alex Smith

What an obscure list of very American male names. Clearly, a few stand out. Everybody knows Joe Montana. Anybody who follows football at all knows Trent Green was a quarterback who had some bad luck, but he had a few good years late in his career. Rich Gannon? Fuck me.

That is the list of almost all of the Chiefs’ starting quarterbacks since 1983. The list also includes names of those turds that took meaningful snaps, i.e., quarterbacks who started multiple games over the course of a season for whatever harebrained reason. The main point I want to stress—well, there are two main points since they are both horrifically depressing and infuriating, and I really couldn’t help myself because what I’m about to lay out is fucking ridiculous—is that Todd Fucking Blackledge was the last quarterback the Chiefs drafted that started a game and won that game. To clarify, the Chiefs drafted Brodie Croyle in 2006. He played five years and amassed a very respectable 0-10 record as a starter. Croyle, in all fairness, played for extremely poor teams (and I mean played for because he definitely did not lead any men on the football field) before he was replaced by the more capable Matt Cassel in 2009 (I’m not being sarcastic. Cassel was better than Croyle, which tells you how bad our quarterbacks have been).

Blackledge was drafted in the mystical year of 1983, the year I popped from my mom’s birth canal, the year the world saw Return of the Jedi, the year M*A*S*H went off the air, the year McDonald’s introduced the disgusting McNugget, the year Harold Washington was elected the first African American mayor of Chicago. So, you know, 1983 had some real shit go down, but nothing more important than the NFL draft.

’83 was the year of the quarterback. Seven quarterbacks were taken in the first round. Elway went first and cried like a bitch until he was relieved of having to play for the Colts. Jim Kelly went fourteenth to Buffalo. Goddamn Dan Marino fell to twenty-seventh, which, at that time, was the second to last pick in the first round. Everybody knows this, but what many don’t know is Blackledge was the second quarterback taken in the entire draft, after Elway, by the idiotic Chiefs. This isn’t about Blackledge sucking. And he did suck. During a seven-year career, this motherfucker only started 29 games. He won 15 of those starts. This is about the Chiefs as an organization sucking. Not only have those morons not drafted a quarterback good enough to win a fucking game in the last 30-plus years, they haven’t even drafted one good enough to start. And just because somebody like Brodie Croyle started some games in the NFL does not mean he was good enough to start. He wasn’t.

When Carl Peterson took over as the King of the Chiefs (no shit, everyone called him “King Carl” because he was an overbearing asshole who would never budge on ANYTHING!!!) in December of 1988, he, wisely at the time, decided to lean on solid veteran quarterbacks. This worked because Marty Schottenheimer was the head coach. Marty was known for “Marty Ball,” which has its own fucking Wikipedia page. Marty’s teams were good. They were. They were old school. Mean defenses and an unstoppable running game. They forced turnovers and minimized their own turnovers. They sacked the fucking quarterback. The idea was basic. You win football games by controlling the clock, limiting turnovers, and putting a lot of stress on the opponent’s offense. The weakness of something like Marty Ball is simple. Teams who implement such a vanilla philosophy do so because they have no choice. Watch the Packers, led by one Mr. Aaron Rogers, and tell me how vanilla they are. The Packers are virtually impossible to stop because they have the roster (clears throat), THE QUARTERBACK, that allows them to play any brand of offense they want. Literally. The Chiefs have never gotten over the playoff hump because, even though I do believe defense wins championships, they have always been outgunned. Do you know how depressing it is to lose playoff games 10-7 or 14-10 because your favorite, supposed “professional” football team fields a high school offense? It’s pretty fucking depressing.

Since the King Carl veteran backup quarterback plan kind of worked but wasn’t an overwhelming success, Peterson decided that they would go after the best has-been quarterback out there: Joe Montana. Don’t get me wrong. Joe Cool is, at the very worst, the third best quarterback of all time. He just is. But in 1993, Joe Montana was 36 years old and about 400 major surgeries deep. He was a shell of his former self. The Chiefs acquired Montana, along with a safety nobody gives a shit about, and a third round pick for a first round pick. Though Montana led the Chiefs to the ’93 AFC Championship game, where they would be completely skull-fucked by the Buffalo Bills—Montana was unceremoniously given a concussion by the Bills’ ferocious defense—Montana’s pairing with the Chiefs wasn’t quite as good as Peyton Manning to Denver. Montana missed seven starts in two seasons with Kansas City. He did amass a 17-8 record as a starter, but the Chiefs gave up a first round pick for a quarterback who only played 29 games for them and took them to the playoffs once. The 1994 season wasn’t anywhere near a disaster. But it was not a success. Just another run-of-the-mill 9-7 campaign that led to one and done in the playoffs.

Enter the Steve Bono Era

Before I enter Steve Bono, I want you to pay attention to the fact that the Chiefs modus operandi for acquiring “starting” quarterbacks was to, what I like to call, accept the 49ers former backup quarterbacks. Joe Montana, for all intents and purposes, was the 49ers backup at the time. He was done. San Francisco wanted to move on to Steve Young, and that worked out for them. After Montana, the Chiefs went with Steve Bono, a former 49ers backup, then Elvis Grbac, a former 49ers backup, with a little Rich Gannon, a former backup who had worked his way to starting for a couple crappy teams, sprinkled in. I’ll skip ahead. In this order (and this is the abridged version of the Chiefs quarterback saga since 2001), the Chiefs then went with Trent Green, a former backup, Damon Huard, a former backup, Brodie Croyle (whom they drafted, but he had no business playing in the NFL), and Matt Cassel, a former backup, before Andy Reid took over in 2013 to trade for Alex Smith, the number 1 overall pick in the 2005 draft, the year fucking Aaron Rodgers dropped to 24th. Alex Smith was the starter for the 49ers until he lost his job to Colin Kaepernick (who sucks) due to a concussion. Smith never “earned” his job back. The Chiefs new regime flipped the roster. They started by getting a new quarterback, a former 49ers backup. This is not a joke by the way. Out of the Quarterbacks listed, other than Joe Montana of course, really only Trent Green, Rich Gannon, and, yes, even Alex Smith, have or had any business being employed as a starting quarterback by a professional football team.

Back to the Bono era.

The common thread that binds every Chiefs team over the years is hubris. Do you know how fucking idiotic it is to think you can build a good to very good roster while somehow continually neglecting to develop a franchise quarterback? The stopgap veteran quarterback plan has never worked and will never ever work for any team long term. The Chiefs, no matter who their GM, head coach, or whomever the current acting owner, the late great Lamar Hunt, our founder, or now his son, Clark, the collective brain trust have always, always, always, believed they could win with a dollar store quarterback. I don’t know. How many times do you have to get burned by a hot oven before you fucking learn?

Sure, the former backup/solid veteran quarterback leading a team outlier is obviously the 2000 Ravens. They won the Super Bowl with Trent Dilfer “playing” quarterback. Motherfucker, the 2000 Ravens allowed 10 points per game during the regular season, and that ridiculous statistic improved during their dominant post-season run. The Ravens D recorded four shutouts. In their four playoff games, including the Super Bowl, they allowed 3, 10, 3, and 7 points. That team would’ve won the Super Bowl with me handing the ball off to Jamaal Lewis 25 times every game, because that’s all Trent Dilfer’s stupid, blowhard dipshit ass did. The Chiefs’ plan, especially in the 90s with Schottenheimer, was clearly to do what Baltimore later perfected, but the Chiefs could never put it together. In Schottenheimer’s ten years as head coach in Kansas City, the Chiefs had a top-ten ranked scoring defense, that is, points allowed per game, six times. He had the top unit twice. So why couldn’t the Chiefs do what the Ravens did? Because we’re fucking cursed. Cursed I tell you. No shit. This is serious. But I don’t want to blame our historic ineptitude on only a curse. I want to blame it mostly on the assholes pulling the strings.

Truth, the Chiefs haven’t won a playoff game since after the ’93 season, the year, they um, sold their souls to acquire, Joe Montana, who, at the time, was somehow simultaneously the greatest quarterback to ever play and, at that time, the greatest backup quarterback to ever play. From 1973 to 1988, 16 NFL seasons, the Chiefs had a losing record 11 times. FUCKING 11!! They went 8-8 twice, which means in 16 years they accidentally won more games than they lost only three times. How did that happen? Well, Len Dawson, our Hall of Fame—franchise—Quarterback from the 60s and early 70s got old and retired, and we haven’t had a franchise quarterback since. And look what has fucking happened. The Chiefs got desperate and hired a conservative, defensive-minded coach in the late 80s.

Marty Schottenheimer, along with “Marty Ball,” figured out the regular season. Under Schottenheimer, the Chiefs enjoyed nine straight winning seasons. Schottenheimer’s only losing season with the Chiefs was his tenth and final season as head coach. That was a terrible season that saw a roster fading before our very eyes, and, apparently, Marty was banging a cheerleader, and that was its own thing. Who doesn’t love a scandal amidst a disastrous season? So, nine straight winning seasons and seven playoff berths? Great! Not bad. Except Marty couldn’t win in the fucking playoffs. Under Schottenheimer, the Chiefs were a very sorrowful 3-7 in the playoffs. That’s not good. At all. Two of those playoff wins occurred in the same season, the ’93 Joe Montana season.

I’m too smart to only blame Schottenmheimer for the playoff blunders. Remember, there’s the curse that I haven’t decided yet whether to blame on Hank Stram or Joe Montana. Most importantly, Carl Peterson was our dipshit GM. I hate him to this day. Peterson didn’t exactly light it up when it came to giving Schottenheimer offensive talent to work with. And the one quarterback we should’ve kept for many years, Rich Fucking Gannon, was let go to sign as a free agent with our historic rivals, the goddamn Oakland Raiders. Gannon would go on to have four monster seasons in Oakland. He would win MVP. He would play in a Super Bowl (an embarrassing Super Bowl for Gannon and the Raiders, which I must admit, is enjoyable for me to remember, but I will always have a soft spot for Gannon).

How the fuck do you let the best quarterback on your roster walk away a free agent to sign with a team you have to play twice a year? Are you fucking kidding me? Oh, wait, I know: hubris. King Carl was convinced Elvis Grbac was the guy. He was younger. He was a prototypical pocket passer at 6’5” and 230 pounds. He could throw it downfield. Most importantly, he was Peterson’s guy. Gannon was not. What a joke. Grbac played four goddamn seasons in Kansas City. His record as a starter was a stellar 26-21. He was out of football before his 32nd birthday. Rich Gannon won MVP when he was 37 goddamn years old. Fuck Life.

Skipping ahead to the Dick Vermeil era. Now this was exciting for me. I was 17 when Vermeil took the reins of our oft-mediocre franchise. He had taken the Eagles to a Super Bowl in the early 80s, and he had put together “The Greatest Show on Turf,” AKA the ’99 St. Louis Rams. Vermeil had a three-year plan. That was his thing, a three-year plan. Of course, and how could it be any other way, Vermeil’s first step in his plan was to acquire a former backup quarterback to masquerade as his starter, but I’ll be goddamned right in the ass, in Vermeil’s third year as head coach, the 2003 season, the Chiefs boasting, and I mean boasting, the best offense in the league, went 13-3. It was amazing fun. Honestly. Priest Holmes scored 27 touchdowns and amassed over 2,100 yards from scrimmage. Nobody could cover Tony Gonzalez. Trent Green actually proved to be a more than capable starting quarterback. The word in the NFL was that he just needed an opportunity where he was the guy, and he got that opportunity and he played well. But our defense was shit. Pure liquid shit.

Carl Peterson could only ever build half a roster. If we had a good defense, you can bet the offense was weak. If we had a juggernaut of an offense, which we did under Vermeil, the defense was a steaming turd. No football roster is perfect. Every team has its weaknesses. The strength of your team is supposed to hide its weaknesses. For example, Aaron Rogers, who, yes, I know is an extreme example, completely masks every weakness the Packers have, and they have them. Their offensive tackles, mostly due to injury, are not great, but it doesn’t matter if your quarterback has the eyesight of an insect and a spidey sense and the arm talent of a mutant. The point is, teams want to attack other teams’ weaknesses, but if they have to sell out to combat the other team’s strengths, the weaknesses become muted. This is only the case if your weakness (or in the Chiefs usual case, many weaknesses) aren’t so fucking glaring.

After the ’03 season, the Chiefs, who had a first round bye, hosted the Peyton Manning led Colts in a crazy playoff game. Neither team punted. Again, neither team punted. There were nearly 900 yards of total offense accumulated between the Chiefs and the Colts. There were nine touchdowns scored. We obviously lost 38-31. The difference in the game was a Priest Holmes fumble. He broke a long run. He was tackled from behind. He blew out his hip. He fumbled. IN THE REDZONE. ABOUT TO SCORE. Incredible, really. Please recap everything that went wrong for us in a single play. We went from taking the lead in a playoff game to our best player, a runningback who had a Hall of Fame caliber three-year stretch in which he averaged 2,189 yards from scrimmage and 20 touchdowns per season (that’s Marshall Faulk type shit), turning the ball over, which ensured that we would lose. To add the cherry on top, on that same damn play, Priest Holmes suffered an injury that basically derailed his career and the entire franchise for the next few years.

Vermeil became too old to coach any longer. In 2006, Carl Peterson brought in Herm Edwards to help make the team look like shit through the 2008 season. Carl Peterson was then finally fired, or he resigned. I don’t remember, and I don’t care to look it up. Fuck him. All I know is that motherfucker was gone and Scott Pioli replaced him. In 2009 Pioli was the latest Bill Belichek protégé everybody wanted, and we got him. It was an exciting time. But, of course, Pioli sucked.

Pioli did a great job of making everybody hate him. He was a psychopath whose goal was to run my franchise into the ground. From 2006 to 2012, the Chiefs were mostly embarrassing. In those seven seasons, the Chiefs amassed a record of 38-74 (believe me, I checked the math three times). I can’t blame Pioli for ’06, ’07, ’08, but I hate him, so I want to. He did enough in four years when he brought in his unquestionable winning ways—along with another goddamn backup quarterback, Matt Cassel. We did win the division in 2010, but that was mostly due to our incredible coaching staff that boasted Romeo Crennel and Charlie Weiss as the defensive and offensive coordinators, respectively. Pioli would fire head coach Todd Haley in the middle of the 2011 season. Haley was a once promising head coach until he had to work for somebody like Scott Pioli. After 2012, a season that saw us win two fucking games, not to mention a season that saw one of our starting linebackers shoot his baby mamma before shooting himself at the practice facility the morning before a game, ownership, and by ownership I guess I mean Clark Hunt, decided enough was enough.

Now we have Andy Reid, a coach who, if he hasn’t proven anything, he’s proven he can lose NFC Championship games.

This is as good a time as any to get back to this curse shit.

I’ve gone out of my way to cram down everyone’s throat the ineptitude of the Chiefs since the early 70s. And I know this is about the time when everybody wants to start trying to get all bullshit positive on me. Well, what have they done well? There must have been some exciting times? The only exciting times we ever have come in the goddamn regular season. We haven’t sniffed a Super Bowl since after the ’69 season. People who were born in ’69 are now fucking grandparents, or they’re pretty damn close. The Chargers have even been to a Super Bowl in the last 20 years for Chrissake. The Chargers? I mean, come on. What about the lowly Raiders? Everybody knows the Raiders were dominant in the 70s. They reached one Super Bowl with John Madden, but, under Madden’s leadership, they did lose the conference championship four times (there just happened to be a very dominant Steelers team nobody could beat in the 70s), and then the goddamn Raiders went on to win the whole goddamn thing in ’80 and ’83. John Gruden, as mentioned earlier, built a Super Bowl roster with a quarterback we gift-wrapped and flew out to Oakland for him. Gruden would be traded (only Al Davis would trade his head coach) to the team who would subsequently thump the Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII, the Buccaneers. The Raiders suck now, but they are on the upswing. Why? They have a promising young quarterback a quarterback who looks like he has all the qualities of the unicorn-rare franchise quarterback. We, the Chiefs, are in fucking stasis.

What about the Broncos? What about the motherfucking Broncos, you ask? Allow me to edify you. I gag just thinking about this damn team, their orange-ass ugly bullshit jerseys. Stupid Mile High. John Elway. I hate John Elway. But it doesn’t matter how much I hate that son of a bitch, and I hate John Elway more than anything imaginable, even more than republicans. It Does Not Matter. He is good at football. He was a good quarterback, and how he’s a good GM. Elway was put on this planet to be good at football and to torture me. So, it’s unfair and ridiculous to assume every team can be that decade’s dynasty. You had the Steelers in the 70s, the 49ers in the 80s, the Cowboys in the 90s, the Patriots nowadays. Denver came close from ’96 to ’98, but they blew it in the playoffs after the ’96 season to the 9-7 Jaguars, who, I might remind you, was only in its second year as a franchise. HAHAHA. But—and this kills me to say—Denver has been a better franchise than Kansas City. Why? Quarterback. John Elway was there forever, and now he’s running things. One of the first moves he made when he took the reigns of football operations was to sign Peyton Manning. Smart move. Now the Broncos have won the division three straight years. Christ. Because they have a quarterback who is worth a shit. However, Manning does look old as shit right now, and he definitely does not fit Kubiak’s offense. But he’s still good enough. As I finish this diatribe up, the Broncos are goddamn 4-0.

Denver lost four Super Bowls between ’77 and ’89 (only three of them are on Elway). Then, of course, those assholes went back to back in ’97 and ’98. During the aughts, Denver went from Brian Griese, to Jake Plummer (who was better than people credit him for), to Jay Cutler who was then traded and replaced by Kyle Orton. Then there was Tebow. And Elway said enough. You win with a quarterback in this league, and he’s right. During the seasons between Elway and Manning, Denver made the playoffs five out of the 13 seasons. The farthest they went was the conference championship in ’05 when the Steelers, the eventual Super Bowl Champion, mercilessly thumped them.

If my obsession with Denver isn’t clear, let me spray some Windex on this motherfucker. Denver is our archrival, our nemesis really. And they have just been better the last 40 goddamn years. Why? They’ve consistently had better quarterbacks. And I think it’s fair and apt to compare your team’s success to their division rival. Why? Because you have to beat them anyway to even get to the postseason, let alone the Super Bowl. If Denver is going to the playoffs, which they have been doing a lot lately, it pretty much means Kansas City isn’t going to the playoffs. There are a few anomalies like ’97 when we went 13-3 to snatch the number 1 spot from Denver, who, even at 12-4, then dropped to the fifth seed. Obviously, we all know how that played out. Then there was 2013 when we went 11-5, good enough for a wildcard berth but not good enough to win the division. Denver’s went 13-3 and eventually embarrassed themselves in the Super Bowl against the Seahawks. But I would be a coward if I didn’t say we embarrassed ourselves first during the ’13 playoffs. Everybody remembers the game that saw the Chiefs blow a 31-10 halftime lead. Hell, we were up 38-10 in the 3rd quarter. No shit. How the fuck does that happen? The Colts had the better quarterback (that, and about a million other things went wrong for the Chiefs in the second half of that game, most of which was self-inflicted of course) and we’re cursed.

So maybe we are cursed, and maybe were aren’t. All I know is that we haven’t won a playoff game in over 20 years. We have seen a 13-3 record give us a first round bye in ’95, ’97, and ’03. Each of those years we were one and done. Losing at home is bad enough, but when you lose a home playoff game when you have home field advantage after a fucking bye week? Are you kidding me? And it’s the Colts. The goddamned Colts. In ’95 Captain Comeback, Jim Harbaugh, stole an asshole-ugly game mostly because our offense didn’t show up, and “the kicker who we do not name” missed three very makeable field goals. We lost 10-7. In ’97, the Broncos came to town for our initial playoff game after a bye. Home field advantage. We lost 14-10. Denver went on to win back-to-back Super Bowls. That was the game that knocked the Chiefs off the rails until 2003 when we went 13-3, earned a bye, hosted, who else, but the fucking Colts in the no punt game mentioned earlier. We lost. One and done again. In ’06, Herm Edwards squeaked a wildcard berth with Dick Vermeil’s leftovers only to lose to, who else? The Colts. I don’t want to be overly redundant here, but to cap this off, remember that the team that mounted the greatest playoff comeback in NFL history was the Colts in 2013 against, who else, but the Chiefs.

If you want to watch a very good and depressing football game, go here.

I want to say the Chiefs are cursed. If they were cursed, at least they’d have an excuse for all this elementary bullshit over DECADES!!! But whose curse is it? Hank Stram’s? Montana’s? I don’t know what the hell we ever did to the Colts, but that fucking team owns us, especially in the playoffs. Honestly, say, in ten years, if for some reason the Chiefs have the best QB in the league, somebody that, you know, they actually drafted and groomed, and he’s leading the team into the playoffs, if we have to play the Colts, I’m jumping off a fucking bridge. Not only do the Colts own us, but they don’t give a shit that they own us. They treat us like those hicks in Pulp Fiction treat their gimp. The Chiefs are flattened turds to the Colts. They just step right on us and keep going, leaving brown pancakes in their wake at 1 Arrowhead Drive.

Well, this has been as exhausting as it has been depressing. Maybe I’m getting old. I used to be proud to be a Chiefs fan. But that was when I was a kid. I was too dumb and inexperienced to understand the true nature of the world in which I live. Now when I talk football with a stranger and he or she learns I’m a Chiefs fan, he or she always gets really nice and positive and say things like, “You guys have a good defense.” That translates to: “I’m only saying nice things about your team because nobody fears them. You do have a good defense, but that doesn’t matter because you don’t have a good enough quarterback to win a Super Bowl.” Tell me about it. I’ve been suffering this shit my entire life.

My earliest, most vivid football memory, meaning the earliest game I remember in its entirety in which I followed and understood what was happening, came during the 1992 season, October 4 to be exact, nine days before my goddamn ninth birthday. We were at Mile High, a place the Chiefs should just chalk up as a loss every year. Honestly, they should save themselves from even traveling to Mile High where, since 1990, the Chiefs are an astonishing 6-19. Ridiculous. Before I summarize the end of this nightmare, you should know that, during his career as a player, John Elway led eight fourth quarter comebacks against the Chiefs, obviously the most he had against any team. The Chiefs were winning 19-6 with two minutes to go. Elway, of course, throws a touchdown pass with 1:55 remaining in the game. Our not very good offense, led by a former backup quarterback who should have never been a former backup but only a backup, goes three and out. The Broncos return the subsequent punt to our 27-yard line. Elway, of course, threw the winning touchdown with 38 seconds to play. We lost by one point. That pretty much sums up my history as a Chiefs fan.