potentialities

We're running perilously short of football. Soon we will be entirely out.

( divisional games )

( championship games )

The NFL got me a Wild Card Weekend for my birthday but they neglected to put a Patrick Mahomes in it. Don't think Roger Goodell read my wishlist very carefully, probably because he was too busy concocting evil schemes like blowing out the TV ratings record by making the Chiefs play the Cowboys on Thanksgiving and scheduling us into a bunch of other inconvenient times and places. Oh well, nothing left to do now but watch and root for the teams that I hate the most to lose to the teams that I hate at least somewhat less.

( hate ratings, or hatings, if you will )

People thought that the 2024 Chiefs were frauds. People thought that Patrick Mahomes wasn’t a top three quarterback in the league and didn’t deserve to go to the Pro Bowl. People thought that Josh Allen was the dangerous one when he used his legs. People thought that this year could actually be the Bills’ year. People thought that their prayers to be spared seeing the Chiefs in the Super Bowl again this year might be answered by some kind of merciful deity. People thought a lot of things.

The Chiefs are going back to the Super Bowl. That's already farther than any other back-to-back winners have made it in the third year. Obviously I would prefer to complete the threepeat, but I think we're doing pretty okay so far.

Commanders @ Eagles — This game really got out of hand by the end and thus did not hold a lot of interest for the neutral fan. It did end up introducing quite a lot of more casual viewers to the concept of the palpably unfair act which is found in the NFL rulebook. Good times!

Bills @ Chiefs — People find it ridiculous when Chiefs fans say that the Chiefs will simply start playing better in the playoffs, but here's the thing: they legitimately do. They've adopted a paradigm whereby they play a twenty game preseason in order to prepare for a three- to four-game season.

This game was nothing like our regular season game against the Bills. Not that they wouldn't have liked to win that game, and they tried to win that game, but not the same way that they tried to win this game. It helped that we’d gotten various offensive and defensive players back, of course, but we were also doing things like calling Patrick Mahomes designed runs, which never happens in a mere preseason game. (I've seen fans of other teams not realize that Andy isn't calling any of these runs. Pat is just so good at reading the defenses and knowing when he can scramble successfully that it seems like it might have been designed.) Xavier Worthy made the Bills live to regret trading back with us to let us draft him. On the other side of the ball, Spags was calling blitzes so exotic that I think you might need a license to keep them. Genuine works of art.

They had to go ahead and be dazzling, because the Bills are a good team with a really good quarterback who happens to be living in his own personal timeloop hell. This is the fourth time in five years that he's had his postseason ended by the Chiefs and frankly he looked like a hollow shell of a man in the postgame. He seems like a pretty nice guy and it’s fun to watch him play, especially if I don’t need him to lose for seeding purposes, but honestly, I feel like it gives us an edge in each subsequent postseason game when he sees our uniforms and flashes back to the previous losses and that’s so helpful. Don't really feel bad for a lot of Bills fans, though, especially the ones who attacked our players with snowballs last year and hanged a Mahomes muppet in effigy. I hope they, specifically, never experience joy.

There was an adorable moment after Pat ran in his second touchdown when he tried to spike the ball and completely muffed it, possibly because Travis was all up in his personal space. I think he was just being proactive, lest any Bills players try to start something with Pat like they did when he ran in his first touchdown and Trav had to fend them off. ❤️

It's kind of wild that we’re rerunning our matchup against the Eagles after we already had a rematch with the 49ers last year. Jason has already committed to rooting for the Eagles against his own brother, much to Travis’s disgust. That subplot should be entertaining!

This year the Chiefs gave me the delightful gift of a non-stressful win for Christmas. No one-score margins of victory, no wacky antics as time expires, just a nice 29-10 stomping of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who are a playoff team, even, although I think they were already fading down the stretch before we got there, but whatever.

With Hollywood Brown back, we've finally realized the vision for what the offense was supposed to be, albeit with DeAndre Hopkins filling in for what Rashee Rice would have been doing, and that trade didn't even cost us that much. If we'd had this offense all year, those games wouldn't have been so stressful to watch in the first place. Regardless, we went 15-1 and locked up the one seed, even though the schedulers absolutely tried to kill us with the excessively-early week six bye and the late three games in eleven days gauntlet, and it's not like the wins count any less if they're crazy and stressful. Now with nothing left to play for until the divisional round we have a ton of time to rest our starters, get healthy, game plan, etc.

This must be absolutely infuriating to watch if you're a fan (or a player, or a coach…) of another team. It's so much fun for me, though!

He’s finally done it, the absolute madman. Patrick Mahomes completed a behind-the-back pass in a preseason game to—who else?—Travis Kelce.

( Hang this in the Louvre fr )

Much like Ahab’s quest for the titular whale, this feat was, according to Pat’s in-game interview, motivated by spite:

I mean, long story short, Travis didn't run the route he was supposed to run, and then it was kind of a behind-the-back pass kind of ’cause I was mad, I was pissed off at Travis. He was supposed to run a flat route—I don't know if you can hear me in the broadcast, I was yelling at him, and then he doesn't run it, so out of spite, I threw a behind-the-back pass, but now it's going to be a highlight.

Hilarious behavior. I'm going to throw you the ball, that'll show you! Pat, this flawed approach could be why you have limited success keeping Travis under control, I'm just saying.

Naturally, once I heard this, I was curious what Travis’s side of the story would be, and luckily he had his own in-game interview, since who even knows when the New Heights podcast is coming back.

You know, he’s got the voice thing, [incomprehensible frog noises], so he kind of mumbled out the play, I couldn't hear it, and I was walking up to the line and I was trying to, like, decipher what he was saying, and before I knew it, he snapped the ball, and, uh, yeah. And then I kind of saw him out of my peripheral run to the sideline, so I was trying to go help my guy out. By the time I looked over there, he was already in mid form, like a photo on a sports card, throwing the ball to me, so it was just, uh, I guess, right place at the right time.

Travis doesn't bust out his Pat impression too often, but whenever he does, it's gold. (Andy Reid supposedly does an incredible one, but alas, we, the public, will probably never hear it, because that's how he rolls.) Not that I think just anyone should be allowed to make fun of Pat’s voice, because that's rude and hurtful, but Travis can get away with it, like he can get away with not even knowing what he’s doing instead of running the correct route.

Now, this is all very fun, but preseason games are barely even games at all, only slightly more serious than practices. I still long to see the behind-the-back pass in a real game. Of course, like Pat said in the postgame, it has to happen naturally—they're not going actually call for it in the huddle, but when a play breaks down, Pat’s so good at recognizing opportunities, and if the stars align and he has this in his back pocket, he could finally pull the trigger on it, and it could be so beautiful…

Every year the Chiefs' social media team tantalizes us with Patrick Mahomes behind the back passes from practices like this one:



So fucking hot.

Tragically, the behind the back pass has yet to be unleashed in an actual game. When questioned about it on First Things First, this is what Pat said:

I think it was we didn’t play as well offensively enough for me to pull the behind-the-back pass off this last year. But it’s no one else’s fault than myself, because Coach Reid wants me to throw it behind the back more than anyone in the world. And so he deliberately puts in plays that I have the opportunity to throw the ball behind the back. So it’s not a coaching thing. It’s me not having that confidence to do it in a game. But one of these games, man, we’ve got to do it. There’s been too much hype on it. We’ve got to do it and hopefully it’s to Trav. He’s the best at judging that behind-the-back pass.

I do love that he just had to get that last part in there, fully unprompted. If he wants his first time to be with Travis, though, it might be a good idea to pull the trigger sooner rather than later, loathe though I am to even think about it.

Oh wow, when I hit post on that fic yesterday morning I was not expecting to hear the news later in the day that the Bills were trading Stefon Diggs to the Texans for a bag of chips. They're eating $31 million in dead cap just to have him gone and be done with it, which speaks to a relationship that had really irretrievably broken down. I kind of feel like I'm rubbing salt in Bills fans' wounds now. Which, to be fair, sounds like something I might have done on purpose if I had known, but in point of fact I did not.

I've loved watching Stefon Diggs since his Vikings days but I will admit that he seems like he can be A Lot. I'm not so much surprised that a team would want to trade him away as that they would do it when the terms are so unfavorable to them. Apparently, though, an actual point of contention between him and the team was that Stefon wouldn't defend the Bills when his little brother Trevon, who's an All-Pro cornerback for the Cowboys, would make taunting posts on social media. Would responding have actually made anything better? Don't any of these people have their own little brothers??

Edit: According to Chris Simms, Stefon Diggs was allowed to seek a trade to any team other than the Kansas City Chiefs. We are the bogeyman that haunts Buffalo's nightmares and I love it.

I’m going to have to recover from that game-watching experience. My goodness.

Patrick Mahomes has still never not made it to the AFC Championship game as a starter, even though his five-year streak of hosting it has been snapped. His floor is an AFC Championship loss, and so far that has happened as many times has he has been named Super Bowl MVP (twice). It's really quite astonishing and ought to be properly appreciated, no matter what else happens this postseason.

In the afternoon game, two castoff number one overall draft picks faced off against each other with their new teams and Jared Goff and the Lions duly defeated Baker Mayfield and the Buccaneers 31-23, although it was close right up until the end and managed to adequately distract me while I was waiting for my game to start. With the 49ers looking a bit mortal in their last game, it's not at all out of the question that the Lions could make it to the Super Bowl, strange as that is to say.

At last, it was time for the feature presentation. There exists a rivalry between the Chiefs and the Bills, although it's arguably just a subset of the rivalry between the Bills and postseason success. The Chiefs crushed the Bills in the 2021 AFC Championship. Then the Bills won the regular season matchup in 2022 and their fans seemed to feel like their team had really accomplished something for some reason, only to find themselves playing the Chiefs again in the divisional round. A truly epic game ensued, with 25 points scored and four lead changes after the two-minute warning alone. When Josh Allen threw a touchdown with thirteen seconds left on the clock, people joked that he'd left Patrick Mahomes too much time to score…and they were correct. Thanks in no small part to Mahomes audibling to a play that Kelce suggested, the Chiefs kicked a game-tying field goal in those unlucky thirteen seconds and won in overtime.

But this time it was definitely supposed to be different. After all, the Bills had home field advantage. Their fans were burning Taylor Swift in effigy in the parking lot and throwing snowballs at players on the field with impunity. Surely the third time would be the charm.

The game reminded me of the thirteen seconds game, and not just because Tony Romo and Jim Nantz were bringing it up constantly. Tony Romo, in particular, is really starting to get on my nerves when he calls Chiefs-Bills games, because he's been hyping up Josh Allen for years now and he really wants his guy to finally live up to his hype and it's increasingly irritating when his commentary starts to feel slanted towards the outcome that he so clearly desires (and it's for my team to lose). I believe at one point during this game he said that “they” call Josh “the Alien” and “Mr. January,” when in fact those are both nicknames that he made up and that nobody else uses. “Mr. January,“ in particular, attracted a lot of scorn, since the Super Bowl is now played in February and he was basically saying that his guy can get to the playoffs but never play in the big game. Which, I mean, thus far that's been true, but it doesn't seem to have been what he meant. At any rate, this game was a real back-and-forth nail biter with lead changes galore, so it did indeed hearken back to the thirteen seconds game.

Fortunately to alleviate some of the tension we got periodic peeks at Jason Kelce living it up in the box with the rest of Travis's posse. Whether this is retirement or just the offseason for him, he is definitely living his best, most shirtless life. He even broke containment to hoist up a little girl with an “I ❤️ Taylor Swift” sign so she could say hi. [EDIT: That little girl shared her story, awwwww!] Travis accounted for two of the touchdowns in the game, so his friends and family had plenty to cheer for up there. I'm glad we've been able to show Taylor a good time with postseason football so far; it would be sad if we could only offer her a loss in the divisional round.

The last two minutes of this game were relatively dramatic, although nowhere near as action-packed as the thirteen seconds game, which is an outlier and should not have been counted. This time the Bills were the ones who needed a field goal to tie the game, and they missed it—wide right, naturally. Then the Chiefs just needed to pick up a single first down to be able to kneel it out, which they did, and that was the game.

It's extremely fun to watch your team just repeatedly rip another team's soul out like that. Mahomes says that he likes to be the villain in away games, and his teammates all confirmed that he was excited for it. Just look at this adorable little villain! We're only three and a half point underdogs against the Ravens next week, so who knows, maybe we'll fuck around and win another away playoff game and go to another Super Bowl in a ‘down year.’

Jason Kelce said on the New Heights podcast that he has not actually announced his retirement yet.

That is a big decision and it's probably a good idea to give it more consideration first, but somehow I think that whenever he makes the decision, it's going to be to retire. He looked really down during the game and again on the podcast, although he did take some time to make his favorite McDonald's employee's day in the drive-thru.