After the NFL conference championship games on Jan. 28, the two teams slated to face off in this year’s Super Bowl were set: the National Football Conference (NFC) champions the San Francisco 49ers and the American Football Conference (AFC) champions the Kansas City Chiefs. In recent years, the Chiefs have dominated the news, especially compared to the 49ers.
However, the Chiefs’ victory, to some, was a big upset. I’ve seen the hashtag #SaveUsLamar circulate on TikTok as fans outspokenly prayed on the Chiefs’ downfall. The hashtag referred to the quarterback of the Baltimore Ravens, Lamar Jackson, and the largely held hope that he would lead the Ravens to beat Kansas City in the AFC Championship. Despite their successes, the Chiefs have received massive hate, but why?
After gaining their star quarterback Patrick Mahomes in the 2017 draft, the Chiefs have made it to the AFC Championship game every single year since. Additionally, within those past appearances, they’ve won the AFC title four times and then gone to win the Super Bowl twice (and potentially three times following this year’s Super Bowl). There’s no question that Mahomes has been a key player in the Chiefs’ recent victories. Even so, it doesn’t mean that he’s the player everyone likes.
Mahomes and those close to him have received their own fair share of scrutiny, which has, in turn, bled onto people’s opinion of the Chiefs as a whole. Mahomes has sometimes had obvious reactions to calls he didn’t agree with, leading many to call him a “crybaby” and a complainer.
Britney Mahomes, Patrick Mahomes’ wife, has often been labeled as “embarrassing” following her sometimes over-the-top behavior at Chiefs’ games, such as when she sprayed champagne on fans to celebrate a Chiefs win. Patrick Mahomes’ brother, Jackson Mahomes, has been greeted with hostility as well after he mistakenly did a TikTok dance on a memorial dedicated to the late Sean Taylor during a Chiefs’ game, faced assault claims from a restaurant owner and waiter, and behaved “obnoxiously” at Chiefs’ games.
All this negativity surrounding Kansas City has sadly only grown since the recent appearance of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift at nearly all their games. Swift is publicly dating the Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce and has since ushered in another wave of attention for the team.
There seems to be no single broadcast where Swift isn’t shown in the private suite supporting Kelce. Her presence is actually good for the NFL, as the games are now boasting a 7 percent increase in viewership from a year earlier. Still, her overexposure has stirred a lot of anger from viewers, and this anger only fuels the growing hostility people have towards Kansas City.
What all this scrutiny appears to boil down to is one key idea: people love to hate successful teams, and this couldn’t be truer when it comes to NFL history. Take, for example, the New England Patriots. For a time, there wouldn’t be a conversation about football without mentioning the triumph of the Patriots, particularly their star quarterback Tom Brady. During Brady’s 20-year time with the team, he won seven Super Bowl rings, making him the player with the most Super Bowl championships to his name.
Like the Chiefs, people had strong feelings about the Patriots success. A public policy poll in 2017 found that 21 percent of respondents said New England was their most hated team, and 42 percent declared negativity about the franchise, making them the most disliked team in the NFL during that time. It’s safe to assume that if the Chiefs continue their dominant run, similar poll numbers for them are sure to appear.
At the end of the day, “they hate us cause they ain’t us.” If all this success and attention was going toward any other NFL team, that team would receive similar backlash that the Chiefs are facing. Kansas City has a quarterback on his way to greatness and provides arguably entertaining games.
With all their victories happening so often, many may feel it’s unfair, and want their team to have been achieving this same greatness. This desire to see one’s team succeed is a reasonable reaction from fans, but having irrational and superficial hate towards the Chiefs and their key figures is not.
With Super Bowl LVIII coming on Sunday, Feb. 11, it’s no secret that I’ll be rooting for the Chiefs to pull out the win. If they are victorious, the backlash they receive will likely skyrocket, but I guess that’s the price of triumph. I’ll continue to support the team in the years that follow, whether Mahomes and Swift are still factors or not, and I can only hope that people learn to love the team as I do.
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