So the season ended with a surprising victory over the Denver Broncos that featured a pair of historically significant performances. A lot of the coverage of the team seems to have focused on this 44-24 win and the solid performances turned in by several young players during the game.

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So the Chiefs game was blacked out in KC for the first time in 19 years.  Among other things, this led to the presence of two geniuses at the bar who thought the game would be on there by virtue of “the Cleveland feed”.  This also led to the asked and answered question series “So is there anywhere in KC showing the game?”  ”Arrowhead.  I hear they’re showing it out there today.”  And that’s about the best thing I can say about the game.

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For your consideration, I present two NFL quarterbacks over a roughly equivalent period.

QB 1: 14 games 11 starts, 18 TDs, 12 INTs, 54.8 completion %, 2608 yds, 6.2 yds/att, 76.0 QB rating

QB 2: 13 games 13 starts, 13 TDs, 13 INTs, 54.6 completion %, 2206 yds, 5.6 yds/att, 69.1 QB rating

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Ok, the title of this post is kind of a lie.  I’ve never been a Lions fan, and I didn’t think Millen was a particularly good or capable GM.  However, the more I see of this years Chiefs team, the more I think, wow, this is the most unwatchable, horrifying, awful, terrible football team I’ve ever seen.  Then I wonder how long it will be until the tired old (but still funny, man that commercial rocked) “Chefs” jokes die out and the Chiefs start getting talked about in the same terms as the Bungles and the Faders.

Then I remember that until recently, there was always one GM and franchise in football that you could count on to completely screw up way worse and in more baffling and obscure ways that what your team was doing.  And for a few minutes, I’m happy.  Then I remember Matt Milled got fired last year.

So I guess I lied a bit at the start of this post, because I do miss Matt Millen.  If nothing else, he made our incompetent guys look less incompetent by comparison.  Sort of like a chubby guy standing next to Mark Mangino looks kinds not fat, our front office looked “good enough” when compared to the disaster in Detroit.

So, this past weekend the Chiefs began their “new era” in earnest.  On Thurdsay, Pioli started by trading away the team’s best player, Tony Gonzalez.  Then on Saturday and Sunday Haley and Pioli conducted a draft that’s about as different from anything Carl Peterson has ever done on this weekend as is humanly possible.  Finally, on Monday the team began a front office bloodletting that so far has showed no signes of slowing down.

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So things have been pretty hectic on the KC hometown front this weekend.  The following four things happened over a 24-hour period.

1. Brian Waters requests a trade after badly failed meetings with new coach and GM.

2. Chiefs trade for Patriots linebacker Mike Vrabel.

3. Chiefs trade for Patriots quarterback Matt Cassel.

4. Royals sign Juan Cruz and DFA Esteban German.

I’ll be going over those moves in reverse order after the jump.

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Yesterday the Chiefs cut Patrick Surtain, Donnie Edwards, and Damon Huard.  This yeilded a total salary cap savings of about $13 million or so.  Combined with the $37 million the Chiefs were already under the cap this year, and you’ve got a team that’s about $50 million under this year and was $30 million under last year.  I’m ok with this because the team is chock full of first and second year players who just don’t cost that much.  The team is rebuilding, the surplus is a side effect of that, not a goal.

Pioli’s track record with the Patriots indicates he’s likely to bring in a bunch of not very expensive but good players to fill out the roster and focus on the draft to build the team for the future.  That’s fine, its a strategy that has worked very well for him before.  But it also means the Chiefs are likely to be significantly under the cap again this year when the season starts.  The team has won six games over the last two years, the economy is in recession and KC has some of the highest ticket and parking prices in the NFL.  Why not use some of that salary cap surplus to cut the fans a break and reduce ticket prices?

The team has sucked and will probably suck again this year.  Clark Hunt pocketed an extra $30 million last year from the young team and Arrowhead was often empty at the end of the year.  Why not give some of that back to your hurting fans and help more people see a game?  It’s good business because it would keep people in the habit of going to games even as the economy tightens, and it’s great PR.  This should happen.  It never would have under Carl Peterson.  Let’s see if Pioli, Clark, and Haley are any different.

Well, to the surprise of absolutely no one in KC, the Chiefs hired Todd Haley as their next head coach.  I’m fairly unenthused about this.  Haley has two years at the coordinator level.  He had a good offense, one of the best in the league.  But.  

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Ken Whisenhut won two challenges today during the Super Bowl.  I’m guessing right now he wishes he’d had a couple of more to use.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen officiating as universally decried as being one sided during a championship game as I did during Super Bowl XLIII.  Several calls that initially looked bad were held up on replay, I’ll admit.  But there were one heck of a lot that weren’t.

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