The 2-10 Chiefs are a bad team. But are the Chiefs a bad franchise?
The question came to mind during the telecast of yesterday's Raiders game. As the Chiefs struggled to score an offensive touchdown, the stats for Baltimore's quarterback, Joe Flacco, appeared on the crawl. Flacco, a rookie from the University of Delaware, led the Ravens past Cincinnati, 34-3. The win pushed Baltimore's record to 8-4, not bad for a team with a starting QB who played in the Colonial Athletic Association a year ago.
Football fans outside of Baltimore don't think much about the Ravens. Yes, they won a Super Bowl in 2001. But the organization hasn't made it back to a conference championship since hoisting the big silver trophy. A carousel of below-average quarterbacks (Elvis Grbac, Jeff Blake, Kyle Boller) has also ensured the team a certain anonymity.
I think of the Chiefs and Ravens as being two of a kind. The Chiefs, of course, haven't won a Super Bowl since oilman H.L. Hunt, the billionaire father of team founder Lamar Hunt, was alive. Still, the franchises seem to occupy similar levels of respectability -- not the among the elite, but not the butt of jokes, either.
Alas, the Chiefs appear to be slipping into a lower class of football team, yesterday's win in Oakland notwithstanding.
The Chiefs have won 63 regular-season games in the last seven-and-three-quarters seasons. The Ravens have won 68. The Ravens have an edge in the postseason as well, tallying one playoff win in three post-Super Bowl appearances. The Chiefs made the playoffs only twice in that span. (The team, infamously, hasn't won a playoff game since the 1993 season.)
But what really separates the two franchises are the depths of their down years.
The Chiefs went 4-12 last season. The Ravens have not lost 12 games since 1996, the year the team arrived in Baltimore after making a difficult exit from Cleveland.
The Chiefs are in grave danger of losing 12 or more games again this year. If Kansas City can't close with a 3-1 or 4-0 finish, it will join a pathetic cast of NFL teams to have lost 12 or more games twice since 2001: Detroit, Houston, San Francisco, Cleveland, Oakland and Miami.
The Sorry Six reached their status by a variety of means. Houston came into the league as an expansion team in 2002. Matt Millen was allowed to mismanage the Lions for an astonishing length of time. The Raiders are run by an enfeebled punchline.
It's worth keeping the Sorry Six in mind when Clark Hunt, Carl Peterson and Herm Edwards talk about "the plan." Rebuilding with younger, more inexpensive players is the easy part. Reducing the frequency and severity of the times you play the chump is one of the things that separates the sought-after coaches and executives from the guys who collect paychecks.
A team like the Ravens doesn't stay down for long. After a 5-11 finish in 2007, Baltimore looks poised to make the playoffs in '08.
The Chiefs, meanwhile, are starting to make a habit of being crappy. Maybe it's time to think of the Bengals as being peers. -- By David Martin
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The only job easier than The Pitch picking on The Star, Phill Kline, and the Chiefs is mine, which is picking on The Pitch.
In what has become my second favorite thing in Plogland*, let�s compare and contrast the Chiefs and The Pitch.
The Chiefs are owned by Clark Hunt, an out of town dude with too much money and a lurve for owning franchises that have moments of greatness and provide incredible entertainment, but ultimately epitomize a �wrongness� in America. The Pitch is owned by Michael Lacey who has the same issue.
The Chiefs are run by Carl Peterson, a master of packaging crap and selling it for tremendous profit without regard for anyone whatsoever. The Pitch is run by C.J. Janovy who packages �Studies in Crap� for free and at least allows for folks to express opinion, and sometimes even listens.
* The first being caption contests for those (the) Trevor fans at home.
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