ChiefsPlanet - Chiefs It’s Over!

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Fifteen years without a playoff win. Lin Elliot. Elvis Grbac over Rich Gannon. Bone, Thugs, 'n Marty (thanks, Whitlock). Head Coach Gunther Cunningham. Jon Baker’s kickoffs, flying out of bounds against the Raiders. Ryan Sims. Greg Robinson’s 32 defense. A playoff game with no punts. A playoff game with no first downs (almost). The worst offense and the longest losing streak in franchise history.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and exhale. All of the above is but a memory, as the Carl Peterson era dissolves into oblivion, to be filed away with all the other failed eras of Chiefs football since 1970.

We should be celebrating as Clark Hunt and Scott Pioli lay the foundation for the future. When Peterson resigned about a month ago, Chiefs fans across the nation threw their hats in the air, but it felt premature, at least to me. I suspect many of you felt the same way.

I didn’t feel it was appropriate to pop the metaphorical bubbly until Edwards was fired last week. For me, he came to represent the last mistake of the Peterson regime, and until that mistake was corrected, there was no sense in acting like the tide had turned.

But now everything feels clean at One Arrowhead Drive. You can almost picture Hunt leaping across the Truman Sports Complex, spritzing lemony-fresh football febreeze everywhere he goes, his private jet spreading hope and good cheer from Dallas to Kansas City. There’s no one associated with the football program for disgruntled fans to complain about. Instead, we sit on the edge of our seats and anxiously await Pioli’s next move, our faith reinforced by his almost unparalleled reputation.

And yet, some people can’t stop talking about the dirt that just got swept clean. Everywhere I look, some Chiefs fans are still talking about Carl Peterson as if he mattered, defending Herm Edwards as if they hungered for one of his stale fig newtons, and in general, refusing to let go of the past.

Even worse, some have criticized Hunt terribly in the past year, refusing to believe he might actually care deeply about the franchise he inherited from his late father. Even following Peterson’s resignation, Hunt took a beating for apparently “taking his sweet time,” in locating a replacement.

It’s time for a wake-up call.

The phone is ringing, Chiefs fans. Pick it up and listen.

The voice on the other end tells you to forget about Peterson. There’s no reason to focus on the last 20 years when the next five can blow them out of the water. Stop now, or you run the risk of transference, the process whereby emotions are passed on or displaced from one person to another.

You’re so used to grumbling about the way the Chiefs have been run, it’s going to be easy to keep that mindset, especially when things don’t immediately change for the better. We need to be patient, because there’s probably at least one more losing season ahead, especially in light of the fact the Chiefs still don’t have a quarterback or a defense.

The voice goes on. It tells you to stop looking for ways to cast Edwards as a victim in this whole process. When a coach finally fails at a high enough level to force the longest-tenured general manager in professional sports into resigning, there’s no defending him. Furthermore, making him wait a couple of weeks for a severance package worth $3 million isn’t cruel – it’s getting your money’s worth.

And don’t try to make a pre-emptive strike in Edwards’ favor with an eye towards the day when the franchise does finally start winning again. Yes, the Chiefs have a lot of young players. It’s completely ridiculous to think they form a nucleus that represents 85 percent of a competitive team, as Edwards claimed a few weeks before he cleaned out his office.

The voice tells you to apologize to Clark Hunt. You feared he would sit idly by while the Chiefs lost 23 of 25 games while patting Peterson and Edwards on the back – you were wrong. You thought he took too long to snag Scott Pioli, but instead he executed his plan to perfection and stole the hottest GM candidate away from the Cleveland Browns. And he did it all with complete professionalism, absolute class, and remarkable secrecy.

If you still doubt his devotion to the franchise, just picture this – Clark Hunt, watching the 2-12 Kansas City Chiefs host the Miami Dolphins in Week 16, in his owner’s box, the glass partition separating him from you, the fans, slid wide open. The temperature that day was 10 degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill well below zero.

The voice tells you to forget the past, move on, look towards a brighter future and stop talking about anyone who doesn’t report for work at One Arrowhead Drive anymore. They are as irrelevant as Elliot, Grbac, Gannon, Baker, Sims, Robinson, the rest of history's droppings and the 15-year playoff win drought.

That’s your wake up call, Chiefs fans. If you’re still having trouble moving on, just listen to Neo. The Matrix may be science fiction, but Mr. Anderson and I feel exactly the same way.

"I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid...you're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin."

"I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries."

"A world where anything is possible."

"Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."