Pizza Hut, a HS honor and 4 tackles: How Chiefs remember start of KC’s ‘crazy’ streak

The greatest season ever from a Chiefs quarterback culminated in the first AFC Championship Game played on the team’s home field. I recognize this isn’t a good memory in Kansas City, but you already know better days would follow, so stick with me.

The Chiefs lost to New England by either a margin of six points, the wrong end of a coin-toss or an offside flag, depending on your perspective. But if you had no rooting interest, that perspective was mostly just good playoff football.

More than 1,600 miles away from Kansas City, for example, at a southern California community college, Jaylen Watson hosted a watch party that evening in January 2019. About a dozen Ventura College teammates crammed into the living room of his apartment, crowded around the TV and ordered delivery from Pizza Hut.

Watson was keen to stop himself before saying which team he might have been hoping would win, as though it hit him mid-sentence that he was sitting on a chair inside the Chiefs locker room this week as he shared that memory.

“It’s crazy, if you look at it that way,” Watson said. “When you’re first here, you’re going to be starstruck — like, ‘Wow, I’m really playing with that guy now.’”

That guy, in case it isn’t obvious, is quarterback Patrick Mahomes. Or, more relevant as Watson nodded his head and re-told that story, the guy whose locker was about 10 feet away.

Mahomes starred on that Chiefs team that reached the AFC Championship Game for the first time in a generation. He won the league’s Most Valuable Player award that season.

Watson watched the game over slices of pizza from a chain restaurant — the NFL not even remotely on his radar. He’d finish two years at Ventura, move to Georgia to work with his mom at a local Wendy’s for another year, play two more years at Washington State, train for the NFL Draft and then share a locker room with Mahomes.

Life in football, you could say, has changed.

For him.

It’s been a remarkable stream of consistency for another. Mahomes will play in his sixth straight AFC Championship Game on Sunday in Baltimore. His career in the NFL has never known anything different than to be at the center of one of the last four teams standing.

The Chiefs’ postseason appearance streak is tied for the second longest in NFL history. It began with that aforementioned game — the one that Watson watched from the living room of his community college apartment.

Six years is an eternity in football terms, at least it used to be before Mahomes came along. “NFL player” is an occupation in which careers age faster than dog years.

Watson is more trend than outlier here. Consider the lives of some of his current teammates at the time of that Chiefs-Patriots conference title-game meeting:

• Rashee Rice, the leading wide receiver for this year’s Chiefs, was mulling over which college he wanted to attend. His first two offers came from Washington State and, ironic to think of it now, Texas Tech. The NFL on his mind? “Hell no. Hell no. I didn’t think about that until my junior year of college.”

That would be four years into the Chiefs’ streak.

• Leo Chenal, who will be a starting Chiefs linebacker on Sunday in Baltimore, had just been named the Wisconsin player of the year. As in, the high school player of the year.

He was a couple of weeks removed from his final prep game — a game in which, after being so sick for a week that he slept in the school’s weight room to avoid driving to and from the building every day, he played every offensive, defensive and special teams snap. Just like all the other games he played at small-town Grantsburg High.

“Never left the field,” Chenal said. ”I would basically puke before, during, after games.

“I’m kind of looking back now, like, how did I do that?”

• Three weeks before the Chiefs and Patriots met in Kansas City, linebacker Nick Bolton — now the owner of the Chiefs’ single-season record for tackles with 180 — recorded the second most tackles in his career (to that point) in Mizzou’s bowl game.

The number of tackles in that game? Four.

He had the NFL on his mind, though it’s notable that only a couple of schools thought he was good enough to even play in the SEC.

• Trent McDuffie, an All-Pro cornerback, often went to the apartment of a University of Washington teammate to watch football. That’s where he was for Super Bowl LIV featuring Chiefs and 49ers.

Funny thing about that one, which capped the second year of the streak:

“That’s the first Super Bowl I remember where I paid really close attention to every play of the game,” he said. “When you’re a kid, Super Bowl weekend you want to throw the ball outside. When I got to (college), I knew I wanted to be in that game.”

Outsiders then. All of them. Kids, even, some of them.

Key members inside the Chiefs’ locker room now.

Those players and others were spread across the country in January 2019 — in high schools in Wisconsin and Texas, in colleges with Washington and California addresses, even in living rooms in Kansas City, like rookie cornerback Ekow Boye-Doe.

That’s how NFL teams are constructed. It’s part of the beauty of sports themselves — the collection of different backgrounds that comprise one roster, all marching toward the same objective.

But what’s unique to Kansas City, in this instance — what Mahomes has made unique to Kansas City — is that those backgrounds were present-tense when a historic streak of AFC Championship Game appearances began.

When this current streak began.

Those players are a part of the same streak that includes Eric Berry, Allen Bailey and Breeland Speaks.

They’ve all enjoyed life-changing football moments — all while their quarterback tries to keep his football life so darn consistent.

That last word is intentional because while Mahomes is the consistent piece in all of this, he’s actually one of the very few constants. It’s the same organization playing Sunday. It’s far from the same team. Here is the full list of those who played at least one snap in the streak’s first AFC Championship Game and are still here and ready to play another Sunday on against the Ravens:

Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Chris Jones, Harrison Butker and James Winchester.

It’s a good place to start, no doubt. But the starting point and the finish line are within close proximity.

It speaks volumes of the accomplishment — and the difficulty of the accomplishment in a league that invokes a salary cap designed to prevent this kind of thing from becoming commonplace.

That’s the makings of whether you want to call the Chiefs a dynasty (not yet), the quarterback an all-time great or head coach Andy Reid one of the best to do it, ever. It leads your argument. As the constants in this streak become fewer, the success is still just as frequent.

Mahomes has been teammates with 142 different players who appeared in AFC Championship Games, with an asterisk that I’m projecting the same starters Sunday who opened last weekend’s game in Buffalo. That’s not total teammates. That’s only those who have actually taken part in these title games.

He’s so consistent that the conversation has occasionally moved on from Mahomes, focusing instead on those in supporting roles, because we know what the leading character will provide. But, man, he sure has provided it while reading from a lot of scripts.

There needs to be a nod to KC general manager Brett Veach and his front office staff there, because they are responsible for that supporting cast — for mixing those stories of 2019 into one locker room now and keeping everything moving.

This doesn’t happen in the NFL for a reason. Well, it’s only happened once longer (the Patriots) for a reason. It’s not as easy as the Chiefs have made it look to preserve consistent results while altering the cast of those responsible for them.

Which is why the fixation here is on the unaltered.

Think of it like this: There are hundreds — thousands? — of high school kids analyzing which college and college football program might provide the best fit. There are thousands of freshman teenagers who got some run in a bowl game earlier this month. There are dozens from those two baskets who will one day step into this Chiefs locker room.

Would it not be remarkable if they stepped into this same Chiefs streak?