Kansas City Copespiracy | GRUFF, Vol. 10

A glass of portmanteau eases the pain of Kansas City and Patrick Mahomes seemingly finessin’ and BSin’ their way to an NFL three-peat, which has not happened since the days of Vince Lombardi.

Jump-off point: the forthcoming Super Bowl, Kansas City vs. the Philadelphia Eagles, on Feb. 9.

i. Catching the downward spiral

Open the blurt locker, as it were. Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce; the entirety of the Kansas City Football Concern, present as the Heel convinced they are the Face.

At the same time, no one ever sees the magic, except the magicians.

That is the amateur diagnosis for why otherwise rational, grounded sports likers chafe that K.C. had their umpteenth narrow escape, against the Buffalo Bills and Josh Allen again, to advance to this final stage. Of course, since these are Idiocracy times, rooting for history also feels adjacent to bending the knee and kissing the ring. Or is that overread? Who wants to do that?

The Philadephia Eagles draw in as the slight betting underdog, even though the math presented them as the most likely champion. They have that ground game powered by Saquon Barkley, a healthier and wiser Jalen Hurts than his incarnation from that game two years ago, and a rugged defence.

And yet, the hottest prop bet next week will is which foul on the Eagle defence will march Kansas City into range for the winning field goal. No, it won’t be defensive holding this time. That already happened!

So…

As a point of gut truth, having a slew of space that accepts some skid-greasing in the National Football League playoffs is perfectly healthful. The games likely are not out-and-out rigged. The term, laid out by our thought leader Bill Burr the other day, is “massaged.”¹

Call this copespiracy: the act of accepting commercialized sports leagues have their thumb on the scales (note the emphasis) in the playoffs. It is a fair-minded way to keep from spiraling.

It ain’t hating. It’s finding a level of B.S. you can tolerate and put in a corner.

How much of your fan bandwidth should it get? Somewhere between 18 and 24 percent. The just-the-facts is that Kansas City has managed to win 17 one-possession games in a row. They have had fewer accepted penalty yards than the opponent in every playoff game since losing against “Tampa Brady” in the pandemic Super Bowl four seasons ago. How much of that is good coaching, how much is random deviation, and how much is the massaging — allegedly?

Sunday, Kansas City benefited, or cashed in, on two contentious officiating decisions that were upheld by video review. The Bills coulda-woulda-shoulda overcome, and did not. Kansas City scored almost immediately — 15 of their 32 points — after both extended delays.

The Associated Press ran an article on the calls, the commentator skepticism.

It is self-evident that the NFL puts show business aspect even more on the front foot in the postseason. It becomes more about audience share and engagement for a league that has argued, when convenient, that it is a single economic entity. It is a profit-sharing league.

Casual fans and international fans are more likely to be interested in, or support, the team that has been winning. That strain of bandwagoning was around the NFL before Taylor Swift made it into the world.

New rules for new fans… counted every 15 minutes. Or more like every 30 seconds.

As a fan, there is wiring that idealizes the pure, level-field competition. Looking around, of course, nothing in daily life exists in that form. Would that it did. It’s been said before, by someone more successful, but the start line is not in the same spot for everyone.

Kansas City being in the Super Bowl will draw more people to the Super Bowl, if not necessarily the demographics who stick around to watch the second half. The Philadelphia Eagles, with that Barkley ground game and that Jalen Carter defensive line that tenderize opponents into a fetal position, are a second-half team.

Of course, what is missing here is evidence. The bent appeal of copespiracy is a healthy skepticism — not the type that metastasizes into becoming your entire persona. This talk was around during the Patriots-Tom Brady-Bill Belichick run in the later 2010s, too.

Should we air out a few? There is still rumbling in the bowels of sub-Reddits about the grass playing surface in Arizona that played havoc with the footing in the Eagles-Kansas City showdown two seasons ago.

At least the Superdome has synthetic turf. That is the realest, the synthetic turf, however on the level.

ii. Feeling the burn

Scanning comment sections, the delineation between Kansas City and the Patriots of the recent past is the heat they give off.

The Patriots had hate-watch heat. They executed at the critical juncture, time and again. Their iconography was also looped into the Boston illusion that their teams are eternal underdogs, and there was no expectation anyone else was enjoying it. So, they leaned into villainy.

Kansas City has a go-away-already heat. That thought bubble formed before hearing Justin Halpern describe the franchise as “a sentient State Farm commercial.” Mahomes has probably made more bank from being a cipher than any mainstream male team sport athlete since Derek Jeter when baseball was in its last vestiges of a vernacular sport.

Between the quarterback, the head coach, and the white veteran with the pop-star girlfriend being in all the commercials have put their ubiquity is through the roof. It has built up to an insufferable certitude, and us haters must feel about as lucky as a practice-squad guard expected to block Chris Jones one-on-one.

There are brilliant parts of Kansas City. They are here to due more to the defence, led on-field by Jones in the interior and cornerback Terris McDuffie, than the offence. This segues into another exasperating part of K.C.’s whole vibe. They are like the hockey team that could play firewagon hockey and win 7-5, but is obsessed with winning 3-1.

Mahomes has the most pliable, adaptive arm talent seen since Joe Montana several football epochs ago. The terms complementary football and situational football cause severe eye-glaze, but they, so far, unfailingly get the seemingly simple 10-yard gain when relinquishing possession would be a dink in the doink. Easy-peazy contrast to the Bills could not get one lousy yard when needed.

It is everything else that rides off that.

It has just been ethered that Mahomes has a sketchy brother who might well only be free since the survivor of his alleged assault faced death threats, harassment, and vandalism and was unable to cooperate with police. The QB’s spouse is a MAGA mouthpiece who is invested in a women’s sports team, great, but also aligned with the war on women at the same time. There is no balancing that.

There is the creepy Christian-nationalistic “Chiefs Kingdom” sloganeering. And the racist chant, ripped off from a college football team.

Do we need to rehash the insanely idiotic remarks about women that their kicker, Harrison Butker, made at a college commencement ceremony? Might as well. How far gone is academia, anyway, that it invites someone who is not even a real big-boy football player to address its graduates?

Let’s remember that it was a misstep in football’s evolution that kicking and punting specialists were ever allowed. Kickers should have to pass a test of basic football skills, like a swim test. They should also have to participate in standard scrimmage plays before they are allowed to kick. And there might be one other screening step inspired by the Ravens’ Justin Tucker.

There was a quick juxtaposition at the start of the game on Sunday. The CBS telecast showed two female fans doing the arm-chopping motion, then cut to Butker, set to deliver the opening kickoff. It was a good reminder that Kansas City is a dark mirror to everything malformed at this moment.

Are the Eagles any better? Enh. Does not matter. They will do for this plot. They better do it.

iii. OK, Mr. Technical

Media types will say Kansas City is going for the first three-peat in the Super Bowl era. Incorrect. The Green Bay Packers under Vince Lombardi won the NFL championship in 1965, then won the first two Super Bowl titles to cap the ’66 and ’67 seasons. Ergo, those Packers completed a back-to-back-to-back reign within the Super Bowl era.

Cling much? It counts as a three-peat. I am very fun at parties.

iv. Of course the Bills go No. 4

Aligning an interpretation of a sporting contest with a healthful mindset is my jam.

If only sports media could balance the circumstantial with the talismanic properties, i.e., the big shiny thing. All Josh Allen can do is get it there, and all Great Man theories of history fall incomplete anyway.

Allen is, scream this till one is blue in the face, the same very good and very appealing quarterback that he was before this playoff loss. One does not have to play into the noise around legacy. Quarterbacks have been over-credited for wins and over-blamed for losses since the forward pass evolved from a gimmick into a standard tactic. Football is much more technically intricate than that narrative framing acknowledges. It’s allowable as a shorthand for sorting through whatthehell just happened. Just don’t actually believe it.

v. Die, lazy narratives, die

All sports content mills should be shut down, of course. One way to start is cutting and shredding the tropes, one by one. Ranking ‘most tortured fanbases’ is one that, and this is the Minnesota Vikings fan who lives not too far from Buffalo and Detroit talking, needs to get up and get gone like a home run ball on a hot August night.

It’s all about too knife-twisty and mean-spirited. It pushes toward all-or-nothing thinking.

It also disrespects the comfort of a rite of radical optimism and the dopamine pellet that comes down after a successful, winning Sunday.

Paraphrasing a line in Judd Apatow’s biopic spoof Walk Hard … ‘I believe in the Vikings; I just know they’re going to fail,’ since 96.9 percent of the potential outcomes for an NFL team’s season involve degrees of failure.

The Bills, Lions, and Vikings won 43 of 55 games this season, for a .782 winning percentage. Existentially, you have to like that.

vi. OMG, Jerry Jones has become Harold Ballard

The first 13 years-ish of my life overlapped with the reign of Harold Ballard (1903-1990) as chairman of Maple Leaf Gardens, Ltd., and the Toronto Maple Leafs. That means my intro-level sports consciousness involved one of the case studies of an incompetent leader whose stock in trade is “confident stupidity.” That is an existential threat to us all right now, as you need no reminder.

In the classic era The Simpsons lexicon, it’s best summed up when Homer rounds up all of his relatives to reassure Lisa that the ‘Simpson gene’ will not doom her life prospects.

— Well, sir, I run an unsuccessful shrimp company.

— But you do run it?

— Oh, yeah.

That was the total of the case for Harold Ballard. He wormed his way into the seat, so a benefit of the doubt and deference is expected, along with a glossing and waving-off of whatever levers were pulled by him and on his behalf. Most claims of his talent rang hollow and self-serving. There is a lot of physical and digital media out there about his awfulness.

For young Sags, Ballard was a thumbnail preview of what we see now at the heads of government and the heads of certain sports franchises, and in how the media reaches to assign “political savvy” or “instincts” to a borderline-illiterate buffoon or slogan-spewing human wind-up toy who walks around like a mob boss encircled by bad-faith-acting advisers. (Names are withheld to keep the bots away.)

That brings this around to Jerry Jones with the Dallas Cowboys. As you likely heard, the Washington Commanders’ run to the NFC championship game means that the Cowboys are the only NFC team that has never reached that stage in the past 28 seasons. The break-even level would be once every eight seasons (16 teams divided by two, of course).

The similarity between Ballard-era Leafs and the present with the Double J’s Cowboys, and a certain maladministration, is driving away expertise and critical feedback. What drove it home was a post by Rodger Sherman that pointed out that Dallas’s fatal flaw is going heavy on player and coaching retention in spite of their lack of results. That is very close to Ballard, who drove off good hockey people to buffet with sycophants, Peter-Principled good-try guys, and yesterday’s-men.

Dallas perennially ranks towards the top of the league in year-over-year roster retention. They basically do not do free agency… they have not signed an outside player to a multi-year contract since 2021 … Even their backup quarterback has been with the team for eight seasons, which seems like a minor thing until the starting quarterback gets injured and the guy you have is just there by default. (This year, their starting quarterback got injured.)

Their coaching staff is generally made up of internal promotions and people who have already been employed by the Cowboys. Jones promoted Jason Garrett from backup quarterback to offensive coordinator to head coach. Under Garrett, the team promoted backup quarterback Kellen Moore to offensive coordinator. Moore was succeeded at OC by Schottenheimer, who was then promoted to head coach like Garrett before him. (What odds can I get on Cooper Rush becoming the next OC?) The Cowboys need to replace defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer—a member of the Cowboys staff from 1994 to 2006 who returned in 2024—so they have turned to Matt Eberflus, a Cowboys linebackers coach from 2011 to 2017.

Commitment to continuity is OK when you’re the Brady-Belichick Patriots dynasty. The Cowboys are not. They’ve won just four playoff games in the 21st century. And yet they keep running it back. Jerry Jones seems to ask: If it ain’t fixed, why break it? (Read Rodge, Jan. 28)

There are, not going to bother to count, only a few NHL players alive before Harold Ballard expired 35 years ago. And yet, the gravity of history, and the multigenerational anesthetizing of the fanbase to substandard play from a team with a market monopoly, means the Leafs are still doing the recovery work.

Essentially, as Sherman notes, the Cowboys’ operational imperative is the vanity of Jerry Jones. And then his nepo baby progeny will get a turn. Any winning at the winningest times will be a happy little accident.

vii. Fair thee warned, none shall pass very well

Two seasons ago, Kansas City and Philadephia finished the regular season ranked first and third in the NFL in net yards per pass attempt. Last season, the NFC Super Bowl rep, the 49ers, were No. 1 in that passing proficiency metric, while Kansas City ranked 13th.

And this regular season, for what it might be worth? The Eagles were 12th, and attempted the fewest passes in the league. Kansas City was 23rd in proficiency but passed more than all but five other teams.

That better not portend a low-scoring Super Bowl. The nice things would be the Eagles’ blocking group springing Barkley to the second level and open field early, and often.

Friendly reminder

I post about current affairs in Notes and on Bluesky (n8sager). Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.

Jan. 25-Jan. 30, 2025
Hamilton, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.

1. Burr made that comment on the Jan. 27 edition of The Rich Eisen Show on Roku. It now has an unfortunate connotation. See, Julie Scharper, Brenna Smith and Justin Fenton, “Ravens' Justin Tucker accused of inappropriate sexual behavior by six massage therapists,” Baltimore Banner, Jan. 30.