The Kansas City Chiefs didn’t win the last Super Bowl against the San Francisco 49ers easily.
They fought hard until they scored the winning touchdown in overtime.
When you consider the game as a whole, the defenses were much more effective than the offenses. Until then, the 49ers’ defense had been considered better, but Steve Spagnuolo made a name for himself and his defenders put on a show in the SB.
Certainly the 2023-24 season for KC was full of surprises, ups and downs, a happy ending and a dazzling future.
The moment that stamped Super Bowl LVIII
It’s hard to forget every detail of your second consecutive title, isn’t it, Chiefs Kingdom?
The team suffered in the first half, especially the offense. In the second half, when Kansas City had already had time to settle into the game and dictate the tempo, nothing worked. The game was truncated and the drives didn’t turn into touchdowns.
When suddenly, on the sideline, you see Travis Kelce, clearly frustrated with the performance of the offence so far, shouting and bumping into the head coach.
At that moment, it probably crossed the minds of everyone watching that the atmosphere in the locker room would be hostile and that Kansas City would put themselves in trouble for the rest of the game.
Kelce clarified the controversy with Andy Reid in an interview on the Bussin’ With he Boys podcast and explained what he wanted to show the team when he clashed with the HC.
“Do you ever just kind of just lose it and just want to win so bad that you just take it up a notch. Your aggression has to go up a notch so that everybody around you feels like, ‘This guy wants it, and if he wants it this bad, I need to match that’.”
“I feel like as a leader, with the Chiefs, it got to that point in this season where it was like, man, I just don’t think we have the right like mentality to attack a team from the jump. I just had to bring that into everybody’s mentality and sure enough, I mean, everybody didn’t love seeing that side of me in the playoffs,” said.
Kelce realised he had overstepped the mark, but felt he was doing what she thought was right at the time.
“I could just see like how everybody was talking about it on social media and everything, but at the same time, I felt like it was making our team better by leading the guys and being that for the team for sure.”
The Chiefs’ mentality had to change after the Christmas Day game
The tight end revealed that the game against the Las Vegas Raiders on Christmas was the jolt the squad needed to realise they couldn’t make the playoffs like that.
He didn’t exactly say that the game was a “response” to the “troubled” season, but that the defeat prompted a lot of reflection.
“We got our ass beat by the f___ing Raiders on Christmas. The Raiders f___ing ruined Christmas.”
Kelce stated that watching the way the Raiders fought to win that game was the wake-up call he needed to realise the wrong mentality the team had been displaying.
“If we play with that kind of edge or that kind of like toughness, that kind of like, ‘Don’t fuck with us mentality’, we won’t be stopped and it just kind ended up like that, but that Raiders game was definitely one of the turning points.”