Reflections on a season for the ages

Sometimes as a sports fan, I sit sullenly by as my team gets obliterated and wonder why I even put myself through this misery. It's happened more often than I'd care to think of as a Chiefs fan. Off the top of my head, losses to Buffalo, Miami, Denver, Pittsburgh, and especially Indianapolis have sent me into a tailspin for days. Names like Lin Elliott, Dave Szott, Kimble Anders, and Johnnie Morton are hard for me to even say without a grimace, which is no doubt a physical reaction that cannot be helped any more. They have been 13-3 a few times in my memory, and each time I've allowed myself to get my hopes up for some taste of greatness only to have my hopes shattered.

The odd thing is football isn't even my favorite sport. I prefer baseball, but I think it's easier to write off the Royals as not having much hope for winning it all every year from the onset. The season is also so long that the losses don't sting nearly as much.

There's also the expectation that if a football team is run correctly it can contend every year. There's a degree of financial equality that puts the Chiefs on a level playing field that the Royals will never be able to experience, making it feel more and more like it is within the realm of possibility that the Chiefs could contend while the Royals have more of an excuse to not be able to make a run at the series.

All that being said, I never really had very high hopes for the Chiefs this season. I thought that they could maybe finish 7-9. Not much better--possibly much worse. Right now, I'm not sure they could beat the Dolphins.

The crappy thing is, I know I don't want them to win. I mean, yeah, of course pride kicks in, and you want them to show some heart and go win at Invesco, but you know each loss could bring them closer to someone they so desperately need, like Jake Long. Seeing them lose so terribly to a pretty bad Denver team, however, is a lot to try and stomach. This was the first game in five years that I've seen (I've missed seeing four games since the 9-0 start season for various reasons) that I actually left before the game was finished. I'd completed watching every game I started for five seasons.

Sunday, I couldn't do it.

I don't know where to go from here. I think we, as Chiefs fans, want to see some changes. I kind of have the feeling that none of the ones we want to take place will happen. Hell, I don't even know if they should. Well, I'm pretty damn sure Carl Peterson should no longer be making any decisions for the Chiefs. His time has passed. He made the Chiefs relevant for a while but has long since whittled that relevance down to a sliver of its former self. As for the rest of the management and personnel, who knows?

I do know this...

I may not even bother watching the Chiefs this weekend, and that's fucked up.