It’ll be four Super Bowl appearances in five years for Andy Reid’s Chiefs when they face the 49ers in Sunday’s game.
That’s astounding for any NFL franchise.
Juxtaposed against where the Chiefs and the old San Diego Chargers stood not long ago?
It’s surreal.
The San Diego Chargers vanished into the mists of time, and their former rivals roll now into football palaces like rock stars.
A franchise that even the loyal folks in Kansas City didn’t find particularly dazzling in many seasons today is hailed as “America’s Team” by Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Costas and other pundits.
This geographical oddity of a sports franchise — don’t ask me why a Missouri team dwells in the AFC West — that didn’t inspire much hoopla outside the Central time zone now commands global recognition.
It was only a dozen years ago the San Diego Chargers stood on equal footing with the Chiefs in several respects, including track record.
Both were family-owned, small-market-clubs playing in old stadiums.
If people outside of San Diego and the Plains had to pick the more appealing franchise, it may have been the Chargers. They’d won five AFC West titles over the six years through 2009, a run sparked first by Dean Spanos’ hire of talent man John Butler.
Earlier, the “Air Coryell” era captured the football world’s imagination, if not any Super Bowl berths.
The Chiefs had won a distant Super Bowl but not much else since coach Hank Stram’s club whipped the NFL-champion Minnesota Vikings in 1970, striking a final blow for the American Football League.
What wrought this massive divergence that began in January 2013?
One, Chiefs chairman and CEO Clark Hunt hired Reid 11 years and one month ago.
Two, a renovated Arrowhead Stadium was deemed adequate by the Hunt family and other NFL power brokers.
Ultimately dooming the San Diego Chargers, no stadium solution was found after two publicly funded renovations of the Mission Valley venue failed to squelch relocation talk.
If it’s true that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one person, the Chiefs’ dynasty bears the silhouette of a broad man with a walrus mustache in Reid, who played as a backup offensive tackle for BYU’s famed coach LaVell Edwards.
A different cat among those football Cougars, the highly inquisitive Reid majored in English and penned articles for the local newspaper in Provo, Utah.
As a coach he has shown himself deft in many areas: teaching football to players and coaches, evaluating players, coaches and scouts, game-planning and playcalling, and applying some of the analytics-driven guidance served to him by the Philadelphia Eagles, the first team to hire him as a head coach and a former employer of his three current coordinators.
The San Diego Chargers’ final game painted a final picture of franchises’ divergence.
The Chargers lost, ending the Mike McCoy era.
Reid’s Chiefs won, wrapping up their first of eight consecutive AFC West titles.
Chargers players walked off Jack Murphy Field, as it was officially known, inside the Mission Valley stadium that Hall of Fame coach Sid Gillman’s club christened in 1967, five years before the Chiefs first played in Arrowhead Stadium.
The San Diego stadium would be demolished within five years.
Clark Hunt knew success before he inherited much control of the Chiefs after his father, Lamar Hunt, a founder of the AFL, died in 2006 at 74.
He graduated first in his class at SMU, concentrating in finance. He captained the school’s men soccer team.
Now he’s best known as the person who hired Reid, whose 14-year run with the Eagles produced five trips to the NFC championship, a Super Bowl loss and a .583 win rate.
The hope for those Chargers diehards who remain in San Diego?
It’s that John Spanos hired his Reid last week in Jim Harbaugh.
Expecting Harbaugh or any coach to match Reid’s record would be unfair. But where Reid inherited a pair of subpar quarterbacks in Brady Quinn and a declining Matt Cassel off a 2-14 team, the cagey Harbaugh inherits a top-10 QB in Justin Herbert, whose salary cap hits the next three years, despite the $262-million extension Herbert got last summer, stand a workable 17th, 11th and 12th among the league’s QB, per OvertheCap.com.
Harbaugh and Herbert should provide a firm challenge to Reid’s Chiefs.
But if Reid’s Chiefs were to raise a third Super Bowl trophy Sunday in Las Vegas, I doubt Chargers Land would object if Reid chose to call it a career.
