Are All Dynasties Destined to Become Villains? The Chiefs Are Finding Out.
Dynasties aren’t born hated; the villainy grows. Do the Chiefs really deserve it, or have football fans simply grown bored by Kansas City’s inevitability?Are All Dynasties Destined to Become Villains? The Chiefs Are Finding Out.
Dynasties aren’t born hated; the villainy grows. Do the Chiefs really deserve it, or have football fans simply grown bored by Kansas City’s inevitability?
It was not exactly the stuff that WWE promos are made of. Patrick Mahomes, sitting patiently at his podium amid a throng of media members Monday night in New Orleans, shrugged away a question about whether he could embrace his team’s growing reputation as the villains of the NFL.
“We believe that we play with a lot of heart and a lot of passion for the game, and then we win football games,” Mahomes said. “If winning football games makes you a villain, we’re going to keep going out there and doing it.”
His tone had all the edge you’d expect if he was giving his breakfast order.
But Mahomes and the Chiefs, who six years (and three Lombardi Trophies) ago were the exciting upstarts of the NFL, are now the closest thing the league has to a dark overlord. As they prepare to go for the first three-peat in NFL history with Super Bowl LIX, the dominant narrative around the team has less to do with a historic quest for greatness and more to do with whether yet another Chiefs win would prompt the same sentiments the ending to Revenge of the Sith did.
“The Chiefs have taken over for the Patriots as the NFL’s new evil empire,” reads a Washington Post headline. “Mahomes and Chiefs take on villain role as Super Bowl hype begins,” claims Yahoo Sports. Even their defenders accept the general premise that the bad guys wear red and gold. “The Chiefs may be the Super Bowl villain but we’d be lost without one,” The Guardian wrote this week. In the New York Daily News, sports columnist Mike Lupica was even more blunt: “Stop whining about the Chiefs and appreciate their greatness,” he opined.
Haters—to borrow a phrase—are gonna hate, hate, hate. And as the Chiefs settle into their full-fledged dynasty, it’s clear that the usual resentment toward any team that just can’t seem to lose is shifting the national reputation of Kansas City. Sports crave villainy. Yet I can’t help but wonder if all this talk of football’s new heel is half-hearted at best, stemming from an audience desperate for someone to hate, but lacking a real reason for it. Let’s face it: The Chiefs are a great football team, but they’re terrible villains.
Problem no. 1 with the Chiefs’ villainy is that it’s not actually rooted in hate; it’s rooted in annoyance. Sports hatred works best when it’s concentrated around a central idea—the Patriots were cheaters, the Warriors played dirty and bought titles, the Yankees were cold and joyless. If something like this does exist for Kansas City, the central concept is its inevitability.
The Chiefs will have now been to five of the past six Super Bowls. They have won 17 straight one-score games. Just when you think you’ve got them, they find a way to win. This season, the Chiefs had just the 11th-best point differential in the NFL, but they tied for the best record. They stick around. Preseason Super Bowl predictions—mine included—often boiled down to “Nothing matters, Chiefs win.” No mystery, no sense of possibility, no room for anyone else. Definitely annoying!
“There’s no Dennis Rodman figure,” Nate Taylor, who covers the Chiefs for The Athletic, told me. “There’s not even someone who’s like, ‘All right, they’re a good team, but I fucking hate that guy.’ There’s no Draymond Green on this team. It’s just Nick Bolton tackling you.”
Off the field, they are, perhaps, even more inescapable. Travis Kelce has a rather famous girlfriend you may have heard about, and as a couple, they are photographed a lot. The Chiefs have won a total of five more games in the past five years than the Bills, the next-closest team, but in total number of commercial appearances, they are lapping the entire NFL field. I am typically neutral on this sort of thing, but “bundlerooski” is driving me toward criminal activity, and perhaps you feel similarly. The core transgression of the Chiefs dynasty is the fact that they just will not go away.
The issue is that the Chiefs’ ubiquity is inseparable from other teams’ inability to beat them. Tagging a dynasty as cheaters or dirty players gives opposing fans a reason to still feel superior despite inferior accomplishments. Deploring the fact that Kansas City won’t go away is only possible through the lens of self-loathing. Want fewer commercials with Andy Reid, Kelce, and Mahomes? Try beating them. Get tackled by Bolton on a critical third-and-short? No one to blame but yourself. It’s frustrating, but it’s too bland to provoke real hatred. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
More on the Chiefs Dynasty
Increasingly, the Chiefs have been winning on the margins. When Kansas City won its first Super Bowl in 2020, the Chiefs were synonymous with explosive offense, dazzling playmaking, and the long-awaited changing of the guard (away from the Patriots) in the AFC. The Chiefs’ approval rating was much higher then; people loved them! From October 2018 straight through February 2021, Mahomes was either first or second on the NFLPA’s list of players who sold the most jerseys and other merchandise.
Since 2022, though, the Chiefs have increasingly relied on efficiency over explosiveness. The very thing that made them fun at the start of their dynasty vanished. The AFC championship game against Buffalo was the first time this season they’ve scored over 30 points. Kansas City ranked second to last this season in explosive play rate, according to Next Gen Stats. On offense, they excel in one thing, which is getting 1 yard, or 1 inch, more than they need, whenever they need it. Their success, especially in the past two seasons, feels algorithmic, precisely tailored to the needs of their situation, funneling possibilities into an ever-narrowing band of outcomes. It’s worth noting that Mahomes individually remains incredibly popular, especially among young fans, and remained in the top five merch sellers this season, which in and of itself suggests that the widespread Chiefs hatred we see on social media or the sports talk shows is probably overstated. But they are objectively playing a less fun style of football.
Problem no. 2 with the Chiefs being nationally hated is a big one. It’s that the Chiefs have very big, bad shoes to fill as far as becoming the villains of the NFL. The Patriots dynasty didn't just win six Super Bowls this century; it spawned one of the most deliciously despised eras in sports history. When it comes to playing bad guys, the Patriots were Jack Nicholson, Alan Rickman, and Gary Oldman rolled into one. Most sports dynasties are eventually resented, but the Patriots were built different. NFL fans, especially those in the AFC, are used to there being an obvious team to root against and for that team to make doing so easy.
“I don’t think it ever got to that hatred with the Warriors, even,” Michael Holley, who covered the early-aughts Patriots teams for The Boston Globe and still reports on the team for NBC Sports Boston, told me. “National hatred is something special.”
Dynasties are not born hated, or even resented, though. I covered the Patriots for the Globe starting in 2016, when the franchise was squarely in its villain era. But Holley reminded me how different things were in the beginning.
“They were cute!” he said.
Cute?!?! If your mental image of the Patriots dynasty is Bill Belichick grumbling in a crusty hoodie, this strains belief. But when sixth-round pick Tom Brady was thrust into a starting role back in 2001, the dominant sentiment was that the Patriots were a team that won with effort over sheer talent.
That narrative eventually proved faulty, not because New England didn’t work hard but because, it turned out, those early Patriots teams were incredibly talented—the first Super Bowl championship team featured two Hall of Fame players in Richard Seymour and Ty Law. (And Brady will eventually join them in Canton.) But no one knew that yet, so, instead, they were plucky—a team that served as proof that even the most hopeless of franchises, with hard work, could be just a season away from success.
The first few years of the Patriots dynasty line up pretty well with the Chiefs’ trajectory. Super Bowl XXXVI, New England’s first championship with Brady and Belichick, happened to take place in New Orleans, just like this one. After New England won, Holley found himself out all night, talking to fans and taking in the scene for a piece for the Globe. Around 6 a.m., suddenly famished, he popped into a Marriott to hit the breakfast buffet, and he happened to sit down next to former Dolphins head coach Don Shula.
“Hey, coach, how are you doing? How about that Super Bowl?” Holley said.
The response he got serves as a reminder of how much things have changed.
“This is amazing,” Holley recalled Shula saying. “Bill Belichick won the Super Bowl with a waiver-wire team!”
Even the coach who would go on to become a key Belichick antagonist was waxing romantic about the lovable underdogs who had just bested the Greatest Show on Turf. That’s the honeymoon phase. For the Chiefs, this was the rise of Mahomes, who won an MVP in his first season as a starter, in the era of dazzling no-look passes and point-scoring onslaughts. They’re well past that now.
National public opinion on the Patriots started to shift around 2004, before any cheating scandals. By the end of that season, the Patriots had won three Super Bowls, and two in a row—just like the Chiefs now. Also like Kansas City, New England’s relationship with the refs had become a talking point. After the Patriots roughed up the Colts in the AFC championship game at the end of the 2003 season, the NFL made pass interference penalties a point of emphasis. It was symbolic of the growing resentment toward the Patriots, Holley said. New England wasn’t nationally hated, but it was no longer an endearing upstart.
This, I’d say, is where the Chiefs currently sit in their villain arc. There’s already been a rules change enacted in response to a Kansas City win. After the Chiefs beat the Bills in overtime in a 2021 divisional-round playoff game, the league changed the rules to ensure both teams get a possession in overtime games in the postseason. And these playoffs, the refs have become a major story line because of a perception (earned or not) that they favor Kansas City.
Still, it’s hard to imagine the Chiefs ever achieving the kind of heel turn the Patriots took in 2007.
It was not just Spygate. How’s this for villain stuff: At the very end of 2006, Brady dumped his then-girlfriend, Bridget Moynahan, who was pregnant with their son at the time, then quickly began dating a supermodel, Gisele Bündchen. All of this both raised his profile and soured his reputation. After the ’07 season began, linebacker Ted Johnson said in articles in the Globe and The New York Times that he’d been made to play while he had a concussion. Holley also recalled how Patriots fans were making a name for themselves as hyper-vigilant internet sleuths who’d bombard any message board featuring the slightest whiff of Patriots criticism.
All the while, New England was on its way to becoming just the fourth team in NFL history to finish a season undefeated and untied. It was a season spent in a defiant crouch, and under the cloud of Spygate, their stunning Super Bowl loss to the Giants became a moment of national schadenfreude.
“They’d already won three, they’re seen as cheaters, they’re seen as morally corrupt, and they’re blowing people out,” Holley said. “You want to talk about hatred? When they lost to the Giants, I have never been in a stadium like that.”
And they were über-villains for the rest of the Belichick-Brady era. Like those 2007 Giants, the Eagles this year have a chance to play spoiler to something historic. Some (unscientific) polls have suggested that up to 80 percent of football fans are rooting for Philadelphia. But it’s hard to imagine that the Eagles stopping a three-peat would produce quite the same level of giddy satisfaction that came from the Giants ending the Patriots’ season 18-1.
Now, one could argue that the Chiefs are not squeaky clean. The past several years in Kansas City have been marked by off-field wrongs, including Rashee Rice’s arrest last spring for his role in causing a six-car crash while driving nearly 120 miles per hour and the DWI crash Britt Reid, Andy Reid’s son, caused in 2021 that injured six people, including a 5-year-old girl who went into a coma.
There are also the politics of a team that’s become associated with President Donald Trump—from Mahomes’s wife, Brittany, whose social media activity indicated she supported Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 election, to the Hunt family, who have historically donated to GOP candidates and causes. Kicker Harrison Butker, especially, angered many last May when, in a graduation address at Benedictine College, he denounced IVF, DEI, and LGBTQ marriage rights and told women they should prioritize homemaking. (On Monday, Butker said that he had “nothing” to apologize for from the speech.) The team name and the tomahawk chop, both of which Native American tribes have asked to be changed and discontinued, respectively, exist in the background of all of this.
I’d argue that belief systems and behaviors that impact real people outside of football are better things to critique than the taping of sideline signals or hyper-aggressive defensive back play when it comes to deciding who is a real villain. But I think most of us know that’s just not how it goes. Hating a dynasty isn’t about hating who they are, it’s about hating how they win. Most NFL teams have had a player who’s gotten in off-field trouble for something ugly. And most NFL teams have owners whose political beliefs lean (sometimes heavily) to the right—and certainly there are millions of NFL fans who voted for Trump. Even if you abhor the more extreme politics of someone like Butker, there are surely enough people who don’t to prevent this from being something that unifies a nation against a single team. If a single conservative Catholic in Missouri is drastically shaping your rooting interests, I’m not sure this is your sport.
This is where the refs come in. The idea that the officials have it in the bag for Mahomes and the Chiefs—or even that Mahomes is milking his status as the top quarterback by flopping—is the closest thing to a unifying reason to dislike the Chiefs.
“There’s no Spygate. There’s no gambling. There’s no ‘You were in Atlantic City until 2 a.m. before Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals,’” Taylor told me, referencing one of Michael Jordan’s most famous controversies during the Chicago Bulls dynasty. “I think that’s why people, honestly, have leaned into the refs.”
But even that impulse ultimately yields something hollow. People really believed the Patriots cheated. They really believed the Warriors bought the two titles they won with Kevin Durant. The Chiefs don’t get all the calls, and I think most fans know it.
Problem no. 3 is that not only do the Chiefs have a relatively weak villain résumé, but they also don’t seem to have the stomach for that role. Most major figures on the team don’t seem interested in playing up the part.
Again, expectations have been set high—the Patriots were great at this. During that 2007 season, Brady said he wanted to “kill people.” For years after, even with goofy teammates like Rob Gronkowski, Brady would post on social media singing along to “Bad Boy for Life.”
Other prominent Patriots players like Tedy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel were well-liked in the media but in a gruff, playfully antagonistic way, and the unofficial motto of Boston became “They hate us ’cause they ain’t us.” Belichick’s entire public presentation became increasingly curated to suggest how little he cared what people thought of him.
Negative portrayals seem to bother the Chiefs. On Monday, when a kid reporter asked Kelce what question he’d pose to the media, Kelce needled, “Why are you guys leaning into this whole ref thing?”
Mark Dent, who cowrote Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin’ Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback, told me that Mahomes, especially, would be unlikely to embrace a negative image or even a controversial one. “He is a classic overachiever, do-gooder boy next door. That’s what he’s been like his whole life,” Dent said. “I think it’s a really awkward fit for him to be considered a villain. That doesn’t mean he won’t use it as motivation, but it just doesn’t fit on him like it does for other athletes.”
Dent had to think back to 2019 for a real moment of edginess from the Chiefs quarterback. In December of that season, the Chiefs played the Bears, who two years earlier had drafted Mitchell Trubisky with the second pick when they could have had Mahomes. Kansas City won that game 26-3, with Mahomes throwing two touchdowns and running for another, after which he ran up to the Chicago sideline and started counting from one to 10 on his fingers, seemingly representing the number of draft picks that went before him. Mahomes is capable of pettiness, deliciously so. But it’s rare that he shows it.
Taylor, the Chiefs beat reporter, said the same thing. Mahomes has always leaned away from provocation, but it hit home for Taylor in the 2023 season how unwilling the quarterback was to antagonize. Chiefs receivers last season led the league in dropped passes, which you would have to believe would be a constant source of frustration for any quarterback. Taylor thought frustrations should have peaked that December, when Kansas City fell to 8-4 after a 27-19 loss on Sunday Night Football in Green Bay in which everything went wrong. Skyy Moore ran the wrong route on a play that led to an interception. Marquez Valdes-Scantling got boxed out by Packers cornerback Carrington Valentine, who fairly clearly committed pass interference but wasn’t flagged. Isiah Pacheco got ejected for throwing a punch. The Chiefs fell out of the top AFC playoff seed. Worse, they lost for the first time in front of Taylor Swift.
Nate Taylor, sitting in a frigid Wisconsin media room at midnight, felt positive Mahomes would let it rip in his postgame news conference. That he’d throw someone, anyone under the bus. And then in walked the quarterback who grew up in locker rooms watching Derek Jeter navigate a career in the spotlight, calm and unphased.
“Their seasons are so long and not one slipup. Not one,” Taylor said. “I’ve been doing this long enough. I’ve been in NBA, baseball locker rooms. You just know somebody’s going to slip up. It’s human nature. But he just won’t do it!”
The rest of the Chiefs tend to follow Mahomes’s lead. Reid, too, cuts a genial figure—his most flamboyant public comments tend to be food related. There are moments when it seems like Kelce might be on the verge of embracing a heel turn. He said recently on his podcast that he “loves” being seen as a villain. Two playoffs ago, there was a whole incident in which he called the mayor of Cincinnati a “jabroni.” But especially these days, Kelce’s profile is pretty conflict averse. He (along with his brother, Jason) is the subject of a new Little Golden Book for children. People runs articles titled “10 Reasons Travis Kelce Is Just So Lovable.” The fact that he’s in front of a microphone for several hours each week and hasn’t changed suggests that he doesn’t want to.
You could say the issue is that the Chiefs are Midwest Nice. Besides this budding football dynasty, the other main thing associated with Kansas City sports fandom is Ted Lasso. “Legitimately, I’m asking this—has anybody ever hated Kansas City?” Taylor said. “Has anybody ever said, ‘Fuck those guys’? It’s not supposed to happen.”
Jason Kander is the former Missouri secretary of state and a fifth-generation Kansas Citian and an avid sports fan. He told me that the success of the Chiefs (plus a semi-recent title for the Royals and the sporty spotlight of Ted Lasso) has genuinely transformed the psyche of the fan base. “I grew up in a town that had a lot of pluck but also a little bit of an inferiority complex,” he said. “And now I live in a place that’s brimming with self-esteem and confidence.”
You could call it arrogance, though it’s hard to say the Chiefs haven’t backed it up. I asked Kander how he’s feeling about this Super Bowl, and he said he’s feeling nervous about how good the Eagles roster is and, at the same time, “entirely confident that the Chiefs will figure out how to win the game.”
He said some fans in Kansas City have embraced being villains. There’s a semipopular T-shirt in Chiefs colors that has the word “VILLAINS” written across the chest. But it’s not too popular. “We don’t feel like villains,” Kander said. “We just feel like everybody is projecting onto us because we’ve been in that situation; you know, we’ve been on the other side of it. If anything, I think what might make Kansas City unique is the level of empathy that we actually have for the fan bases that our team vanquishes on a regular basis.”
“We are,” he said, “the benevolent dictator of the NFL.”
Now, please understand. I’m not telling you to root for the Chiefs—or even that you should like them. I respect pettiness. I wish Kansas City would ham up the villain thing, at least a little bit. And I don’t believe it’s even possible, really, for the football world to embrace its benevolent overlords. Sports fans are just not built that way.
Nadav Goldschmied is a professor of psychological sciences at the University of San Diego who has studied the psychology of inequality—in essence, he seeks to understand why we root for underdogs. He has found that there’s a human tendency to associate teams that have lower expectations of winning with positive qualities.
Goldschmied explained to me one study he conducted with his colleagues in which groups of participants were shown a few minutes of a basketball game played between two teams of anonymous players. Half the participants were told that one team was the favorite and the other was the underdog. The other half had those designations switched. “Regardless of what they saw, they always attributed greater effort to the team described to them as the underdog,” Goldschmied told me.
So, we root for the underdog because we think they work hard. They deserve it more. And when we think about underdogs, we tend not to imagine them losing. In another study, Goldschmied and his colleagues asked participants to recall the endings of sports movies that featured underdog characters. For a movie like Cinderella Man, in which Russell Crowe’s aging boxer prevails in the end, most participants recalled the ending correctly. But when asked to recall the finish of the first Rocky movie, a disproportionate number of participants forgot that Apollo Creed actually wins the final fight, misremembering the rags-to-riches Rocky Balboa as having come out on top.
Dynasties eventually end, and those moments can be exuberant. But fans tend to imagine the Helmet Catch or Philly Special more easily than the many years of futility their teams experienced before the breakthrough. Though I won’t try mentioning this to Bills fans anytime soon.
This is not a finished story. A win or loss on Sunday for Kansas City will shape public sentiment in different ways. A loss could make the team easier to root for. It would also add genuine tension to the question of whether this dynasty will ever equal or surpass the one in New England that came before it—and we know by now that there are few uniting forces in sports like rooting against the Pats. Should the Chiefs win Sunday, Taylor wonders whether anyone on the team will take a moment to gloat.
“Will anybody take a chance to, you know, stick everybody’s face in it?” he asked. “I don’t think Pat will say anything, and I’m not even sure Travis will say anything, … but I’m really intrigued to see if somebody’s going to do that, either the day they win or days afterward.”
Perhaps they will, quenching the national thirst for something to truly deplore. But they also may not. It’s entirely possible, if not likely, that the Chiefs could squeak out yet another win, celebrate, say all the right things, and kiss their wives, pop star girlfriends, and babies on the field while the confetti falls. In a way, it’s actually that outcome, and all the ensuing frustration without an obvious outlet, that I think most would find the hardest to swallow.
If you feel that way—if the inevitable Chiefs have left you tearing your hair out but unsure of whom to blame—you’re not alone. But I want you to understand that leaves you with two choices to root for. You could hope that the Chiefs win and someone takes the bait, choosing to go full Sith lord. Or, you could lend your support to the cuddly, always nationally beloved opposing franchise: the Philadelphia Eagles.
