Chiefs: The Big Idea
The National Football League is made of historical moments and sayings. Basically, the “idea” of creating a professional sports league for grown men to play a competitive game with an oblong shaped piece of the skin made of an animal’s parts seems a bit barbaric when you think about it. That’s why I often contemplate the NFL as an idea. It’s someone’s big idea for sure… or group of someones. In any case, if you’re a fan, it’s an idea we’ve all bought into.
Take the idea of a championship. No, not a Super Bowl but, a championship game. When I was a kid the NFL was broken up into two conferences and the top two teams played for a championship. Take 1955 when the 9-2-1 Eastern Conference Champ, Cleveland Browns, beat the 8-3-1 Western Conference Champ, Los Angeles Rams, 38-to-14. The game drew more than 87,000 fans and was played on a Monday (the idea of Monday Night Football, which began in 1970, had roots that went much further back than that).
The design of a two-conference league was pretty simplistic. Yep, something every kid I knew was thrilled to follow. Then, along came a guy named Lamar Hunt who wanted to join the NFL but was rejected so… he started his own league with the help of a few other rich buddies he knew.
Great ideas have a way of exploding. Some others… you have to wonder about.
Haven’t you ever wondered how humans ever started drinking cow’s milk. Was it because some poor sap was laying under a cow one day (for some inexplicable reason) and…. oh you finish the story. There are just too, too many questions like that, which we often take for granted.
I’m not trying to start a race war conversation here when I ask this next question but… whose idea was it “initially” to decide to name an NFL team after the color of the skin of a whole race of people? “The Redskins?” Really? How did that conversation sound? “Hey, see that guy standing over there… isn’t his skin a different color… wait… I have a great idea: let’s name a professional football team after his pigmentation. People will love it.” To this day I don’t know why some people can’t see that grouping people and dis-favorably labeling them is implicit bias.
Oh well, it appears that protesting bias is an “idea” that has come and gone for many.
I suppose there are similar questions which could be asked about a team named after a group of Indian leaders… “The Chiefs?” Go figure. However, “GO CHIEFS!” does roll off the tongue much better than any other team’s “GO _______ … whatevers!”
Not to trivialize any individual’s, or group’s, challenge with the issues of bias and racism but, I would be fine with a team being called “The Whitey’s” as long as their uniform didn’t involve wearing white hoods. In that world, wouldn’t it be great if the owner of “The Whitey’s”… was not.
Another idea I like to bandy about in my consciousness is famous quotes. How about the one by Vince Lombardi that says,
“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
I’ve always felt that this statement had an underlying premise that was faulty. While the “it’s the only thing” adage seems to catch on with jock-types to a certain degree it turns 31 teams in the league into poop-cakes once a year ends. Also, there are as many games won each year as there are games lost… meaning there are still 31 flavors of Loser at the end of each season. 31 wannabe coaches. 31 organizations filled with hacks.
It just doesn’t really feel that way to me. When my daughter was a kid she knew some boys who would say, “I’m a Loser, and Losers rule.” That sounds more truthful to me… but maybe it’s just because I’m a Loser too. Also, “it’s the only thing” just sets too many of us up to be exactly that… when I don’t believe that’s really the case. My 6th-grade basketball team never lost a game and we won all of Southern California… and… years later my daughter’s 6th-grade basketball team never won a game but I don’t think of my daughter as a Loser for going out and giving her best every game. “It’s the only thing” doesn’t account for that idea does it?
In fact, for every NFL team that you can mention as a team with a winning tradition… you can also match another team, during any era, with a losing tradition. You can’t have one without the other.
The Seattle Seahawks Abominable-know-it-all Man Richard Sherman said on Thursday following their game with the Los Angeles Rams that he went up to Pete Carroll right after he threw the ball at the one-yard line (AGAIN) and told him he wasn’t comfortable with that. A reporter asked him if that was his place to do that, to which Sherman replied, “100%. We sacrifice, we battle. You don’t give away our battle. You honor our sacrifice.”
It’s a statement against the norm. In most workplace situations, the employees don’t rule the roost or tell their bosses what they think in the middle of a deal going down. The idea of Sherman having a “say-so” in what is called… or not called… makes sense but it’s certainly not the norm.
Sherman’s boundary busting comment reminds me of another such — concept — that many a coach since then has negotiated to include in his contract. It’s an idea that Bill Parcells introduced to the masses when he said this of coaching and drafting and signing free agents,
“’It’s just like a friend of mine told me. If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.”
Of course, Andy Reid learned the hard way that the Parcells way is not meant for everyone. A head coach can spread himself too thin by scooping all the player acquisition responsibility onto his plate. There’s only so much one person has time to digest in a day. Andy looks like he’s digested plenty enough in his day. I’m glad John Dorsey is here to help him buy the groceries.
One “idea” that has come into question, which I don’t recall ever being a problem until the past ten years… is the idea that some ball that players catch, should not be considered a “catch.” I remember playing football in the yard… at the park… on the beach… and in each of these places, the guys playing the game would decide… what was in bounds or out of bounds… what was legal or illegal… and… you either caught the ball or you didn’t. Yes, I’m presenting the viewpoint that I’m weary of the “what’s a catch” debate. Let’s not debate that. Let’s just get a few guys from each team to make the call.
One big idea that has risen like a Phoenix is the idea that Arrowhead Stadium is the loudest in the world. Here’s one player that would agree with that assessment.
That #FridayFeeling! #ChiefsKingdom pic.twitter.com/nSsiP2pf0Y
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) December 16, 2016
I have shared the idea that the reason for Arrowhead’s elevated decibels has more to do with the physics behind the circular, or oval, shape than the whacky witnesses going out of their minds screaming and a-hollerin’. I think Arrowhead has another effect on its inhabitants. In a piece by Futurist Thomas Frey called “10 Unanswerable Questions That Neither Science Nor Religion Can Answer” he says,
“A few years ago I was taking a tour of a dome shaped house, and the architect explained to me that domes are an optical illusion. Whenever someone enters a room, their eyes inadvertently glance up at the corners of the room to give them the contextual dimensions of the space they’re in. He went on to explain that since domes have no corners, that from the inside they appear larger than what they really are, and from the outside, they appear smaller than the space of another house with a comparable footprint.”
While Arrowhead is not exactly a dome, this little snippet raises the idea of context for its infrequent Sunday visitors… the teams who play “away games” at Arrowhead. I’m struck by the idea that the oval shape may offer a similar optical illusion of size an endlessness for the eye. Could this interpretation help in proving that Arrowhead Stadium is really the 3rd best stadium in the NFL as USA Today has ranked them?
I don’t know… but I like the thought of that. I hope K.C. can ride their “perceived” home field advantage to a victory over the Tennessee Titans on Sunday. Only I have a funny feeling (usually never really funny) that they’ll need to press on the accelerator much more than they can expect to do any cruising. I have an inkling of an idea that this will be the case.
