ChiefsPlanet - Chiefs There’s an art form to asking very large, sweaty and angry men why they stink...

Survival is the name of the game for Chiefs
By JOE POSNANSKI
The Kansas City Star

ATLANTA | There’s an art form to asking very large, sweaty and angry men why they stink at the game of football. You want to be sensitive. You want to be diplomatic. You want to be sympathetic. You want to ask the question in a way that won’t get you folded into uncomfortable-looking origami shapes.

So, in the locker room after the Chiefs’ 12th consecutive loss — a 38-14 humiliation to Atlanta in front of 14 or 15 people in the Georgia Dome — you heard lots of very odd-sounding questions like, “Did you feel like this was a step forward?” And, “Could you see any progress being made?” And, “Was there anything you can take from this to build on?”

These are known as “survival questions.” No, of course there was nothing good to come out of Sunday’s game. Nothing. The Chiefs made Atlanta’s rookie quarterback Matt Ryan look like Roger Staubach. The Chiefs’ defense — supposedly the strength of the team — missed about 23 tackles, and that was on just one Michael Turner run. The Chiefs punted four times in the first quarter, and that was only because they ran out of time. The fifth punt came 1 minute, 17 seconds into the second quarter.

No, there was nothing good to come out of Sunday’s game. Except this: Everybody made it out of Atlanta alive.

And really, at this point, all anyone wants is to survive this season. Let’s just try to get through this thing without anybody getting hurt. The Chiefs are as bad a football team as I have ever been around, and I was around some doozies in Cincinnati back in the mid-1990s. Those Bengals teams weren’t just bad, they were comedy. I remember a Bengals player fair-catching a punt at the 1 once.

Then again, on Sunday, Kansas City’s B.J. Sams fair-caught a punt at the 7 twice. In the fourth quarter.

I remember the Bengals once taking back-to-back delay-of-game penalties. That seemed about as low as a team could go.

Then again, on Sunday, Kansas City’s Tyler Thigpen began the game by completing one of his first 11 passes for minus-1 yard with an interception mixed in. He completed his first pass for positive yards about 7 minutes into the second quarter. He celebrated the achievement by throwing another interception on his next pass.

I remember what it was like after all those Bengals losses. Every week, it was the same dreadful scene. The Bengals would lose horribly. Then the football coach, Dave Shula, would try to spin a couple of positives in his news conference. Hey, the players didn’t give up. Hey, there was that one good drive in the third quarter. And so on.

Then, in the locker room, reporters would try to find delicate ways to broach the subject of the team’s collaborative awfulness, and players would try to find new ways to say that everybody had to stay positive and stay together. It was like “Gilligan’s Island.” The plot changed slightly each time out, but the overriding story, as always, was that nobody was ever getting off the island.

That was the scene Sunday. Apparently, it’s like this for every bad team. First, the Chiefs lost horribly. The Chiefs’ defense could not come close to stopping a Falcons team that finished 29th in the NFL in scoring last year; the Chiefs’ offense was hopeless until the game was out of reach; kicker Nick Novak missed a 32-yard field goal in a dome; the Chiefs decided to run a sweep on fourth and goal from the 2 (failed); and so on. There were a couple of blown timeouts in there, too. Bad football, all around.

Then, the game ended and Chiefs coach Herm Edwards, who usually can be counted on to at least offer up a couple of memorable lines, mumbled a monotone spiel about how everyone has to play better and how the Chiefs didn’t quit.

“We battled back in the second half, which was good,” he said.

Of course, he didn’t believe that was really good. He could not believe that there was anything good about this day. They battled back, big deal. Former Kansas State coach Bill Snyder offered the greatest answer when someone said to him, “Well, your team didn’t quit.” He said: “They don’t let you quit.”

No, Edwards was just saying what coaches say when they have hopelessly bad football teams. If there’s one thing you could say about Edwards, it was that he brought energy and enthusiasm and life to the game. Sunday, he looked sapped. He looked beaten.

Then, in the locker room, reporters asked cautious questions, and players talked about how they had to stay positive and stay together.

“We have to be professionals,” guard Brian Waters said.

“We have to play a lot better,” tight end Tony Gonzalez said.

“(Expletive),” running back Larry Johnson said.

“We’ve got to eliminate mistakes,” defensive tackle Glenn Dorsey said.

Also, the players did have something to say about the length of the football season.

“It’s a long season,” Waters said.

“Long season,” Gonzalez said.

“We’ve got a long season ahead of us,” cornerback Brandon Flowers said.

“(Expletive),” running back Larry Johnson said.

Yes, it is a long season. And it is getting longer all the time. The whole fiasco was probably best summed up by Tyler Thigpen, who said: “We started off slow, and then we started to come on as an offense. We need to reverse that.”

Right, or, um, what? Reverse that? No, if they reverse that, doesn’t that mean the Chiefs would start off fast and then slow down? Nobody asked. Everybody just wanted to get home safely.