Kansas City Chiefs preach process over prize, but Super Bowl repeat is the obvious goal
Safe to say everyone participating in the Chiefs’ training camp at Missouri Western State arrived here aware of what’s within their grasp this season.
An increasingly rare and precious repeat Super Bowl victory would make for a third title in five seasons and, irrefutably, the neon-bright distinction of dynasty the Chiefs arguably already have achieved.
Just in case, though, chairman and CEO Clark Hunt made it a theme of his opening address to the team:
“To go back-to-back,” Hunt said, as seen in the most recent episode of “The Franchise.” “Hasn’t been done in a long time. It’s a really hard thing to do. We had a shot at it two, three years ago, and we came up short. That’s the goal this year, and we’ve got the group of people here to get it done.”
Moreover, coach Andy Reid and superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes stressed the priceless prospect when they initially addressed the team here. And in any given place, you might happen across visual or verbal messaging about the mission.
“The picture of that Super Bowl ring,” new linebacker Drue Tranquill said, “is on the start of every single slide of every presentation.”
For all that, though, the elephant in the room now has been put in timeout and told to go face the corner.
Yes, the grand hope is ever-percolating and ambient background noise. It’s everywhere in the air, really.
But it’s nuanced, even obscured, in the day-to-day grind.
Because it’s dangerous to stare into the sun.
And maybe the best way to keep your eyes on the prize is to avert your gaze.
If that sounds counterintuitive, well, it’s counterproductive to the ultimate goal to be so consumed with it as to make that the direct daily focal point and miss the essential steps in the journey: being in the moment, seizing each day, and, yes, “the process.”
Call those thoughts cliche`s, sure, but don’t call them meaningless.
“I’m always confident we have a chance to get to the Super Bowl,” Mahomes said the July day he reported here. “But I understand it’s a process. I understand it’s not easy. And so I’m going to try to build myself and then help our team get better.”
He means it, and here’s why: controlling the controllable, immediate and tangible steps to whatever might be.
The output, after all, is always a direct function of the input. No matter how much you might just wish for a result or trust random events to make them happen.
It’s the day-in, day-out right now that will make for the mortar and measure of what this team will be, Reid knows and stresses.
Because it’s one thing to have the quest for the repeat be subliminally hovering all over, but it’s quite another to focus directly on an event irrelevant to how today goes.
It’s impossible to precisely gauge how this notion is going over this preseason. Perhaps paradoxically, we most likely won’t really understand that until we look back later.
But by all observations and appearances this has been an energized and feisty camp, which makes for a point of broader encouragement.
Especially if you were under the delusion that some sense of satisfaction or entitlement would be lurking.
One case in point: While Reid has no tolerance for fighting in camp, he wasn’t altogether displeased after Travis Kelce was in one of a few dustups here the other day.
He’s “OK with chippy,” after all, because it’s part of the passion and challenging each other. As for Kelce’s involvement, Reid joked, “I’m just glad that at that old he’s still got some juice in him.”
To the contrary, Kelce will tell you.
Coming to camp, perhaps especially after a high-profile offseason that included hosting Saturday Night Live, helps “get your mind straight.”
Not by focusing on the end, though, but on the means.
“If you bring that energy every single day,” Kelce said, “you’re going to find ways to get better.”
And right here, right now also is the portal to tomorrow.
When second-year cornerback Joshua Williams was asked the other day about why it’s been so hard for teams to repeat (the 2004 Patriots were the last to do so), he spoke at once to the urgency of the day and the bigger picture.
Noting Reid’s tendency to call out “ ‘edge, edge, edge’ as one of our mottos,” Williams said, “You see how hard we go every day. I don’t think anybody on that field is complacent; I think everybody is going 100 percent.
“And if you can’t see that, then you’re not watching the practices.”
About that word: edge.
To be sure, the Chiefs always will have an innate edge in Mahomes, he of the singular talent fueled by some sort of internal eternal flame.
But “edge” in this context is about something else entirely.
The word memorialized on the Chiefs’ Super Bowl LVII ring (albeit among a galaxy of other themes and baubles just short of infinity stones) last season also was an imperative posted on the wall where the Chiefs ran up the stairs from the locker room to the field at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.
Perhaps Reid had similarly drawn on the word over the years.
But its recent usage has a direct application back to the bewildering collapse against the Bengals in the AFC Championship Game two seasons ago.
On the cusp of a third straight Super Bowl berth with a 21-3 lead, the Chiefs self-destructed and lost 27-24 in overtime. The cave-in was multifaceted, but Reid conceived a common theme behind it.
As he sat in his Missouri Western State dorm room with a few reporters one day during camp last year, Reid mentioned he had “a pretty good feel (for) what went on.”
Asked what he meant and whether it was about something mental or physical, Reid said “they go together.”
Then he turned toward a “certain attitude, certain edge that you’ve got to maintain” and added, “You’ve got to be able to say, ‘I’m wrong, I was wrong, to do that.’ And not hide it. Not mask it. We’ve kind of done that.”
Reid declined to elaborate at the time.
But it was evident that one way to speak directly to any lingering tendency to slack up — and to cultivate edge — was to conduct what seemed a particularly harsh training camp.
Beyond merely being a rugged proving ground, Reid also sees camp as the setting to reset after auditing the season before.
Framed by the notion that every season is its own story no matter how it meshes with the past and present, Reid presents tweaks and wrinkles and even outright changes.
The better to offset opponent adjustments, yes, but it’s also a way to avoid being stagnant — and engage even veterans in the moment.
“We got another playbook compared to last year,” Kelce said. “It has to keep changing. It has to keep evolving.”
Just like this team seeks to overall.
Not by constant, lofty and essentially meaningless (right now, anyway) talk about the end game.
But in the trek that makes it possible.
“You want to maintain your edge as you go through daily, make it a habit,” Reid said. “And that edge helps drive you to be the best you can be, that day.
“And when you’re finished with that one, you line up the next day and do that.”
This story was originally published August 4, 2023 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Kansas City Chiefs preach process over prize, but Super Bowl repeat is the obvious goal."