How the 2024 Super Bowl-bound Chiefs parallel the team that won Super Bowl IV
By Vahe Gregorian Updated February 01, 2024
Randy Mason As one of the foremost experts on the team has put it, the stellar Chiefs defense resonates as “superb at all three levels, from the dominating defensive line to the agile, potent linebackers to the marauding secondary.” Its innovative variety stands out, he wrote, as having been “designed to be aggressive and confounding, concealing intentions and adding a moment of hesitation to elemental offensive duties like blocking assignments.” Among its other distinctions, a defense that carried the Chiefs back to the Super Bowl will be remembered for two of the best defensive backs in the game, and a superstar “behemoth” in the trenches, and being infused with vital players from the Big Ten, a Notre Dame linebacker and a Louisiana-born safety. If that sounds familiar, it should. Just not in and of itself. Because those traits and flourishes speak not only to this season’s Chiefs but also to that of the 1969 unit — one of the best and most influential in the history of the game. To clarify, this group isn’t of the same stature of the predecessor ranked by ESPN in 2007 as the seventh-best in the history of the game and featuring six future Pro Football Hall of Famers: Bobby Bell, Buck Buchanan, Curley Culp, Willie Lanier, Johnny Robinson and Emmitt Thomas. For that matter, it can’t even be called the Chiefs’ best defense since then — particularly considering the handful of Marty Schottenheimer teams that allowed fewer points per game than this season’s team. But there’s some substantial similarities between them that make for at least one momentous parallel: the sheer impact on the team and season. For all the glitz and glamor of the Patrick Mahomes era on offense, these Chiefs wouldn’t be playing San Francisco in Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11 without this defense any more than the Len Dawson-led Chiefs would have won Super Bowl IV without that venerable group.
That’s what most struck my friend Michael MacCambridge, quoted above from his book “‘69 Chiefs: A Team, A Season and the Birth of Modern Kansas City,” when I called him to talk about the compare/contrast points to this. But there’s more in the mortar of it all. Most apparently, the Chiefs then as now were second in pro football in points allowed per game (12.6 in 1969; 17.29 this season). Then as now, the defense saved the postseason with spectacular moments that essentially rescued games (the fabled goal-line stand against the Jets that season; L’Jarius Sneed knocking the ball loose from Zay Flowers at the goal line last week) and by muzzling some of the best offenses in football through a treacherous path. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback praised defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo's unit during a press conference on Thursday. Those Chiefs stifled the defending Super Bowl champion Jets, the winningest team in the AFL that season (the Raiders) and the highest-scoring team in football (the Vikings) to a total of 20 points. That was a singular, jaw-dropping feat. But at least adjusted for scoring inflation in the context of today’s game, this edition’s postseason ledger is relatively comparable in holding three (Miami, Baltimore and Buffalo) of the six most prolific offenses in the game to 7, 24 and 10 points along the way to the Super Bowl. And as with the AFL Championship Game against Oakland back in the day, the Chiefs gave up just one touchdown against the Ravens in this season’s AFC Championship Game. Something else connects, though, that gives all this a certain relevance now. Something beyond the interesting coincidences, such as ingenious scheming (Hank Stram’s “triple stack” and Steve Spagnuolo’s infinite playbook); dominant defensive backs (Thomas and Robinson then, Sneed and Trent McDuffie now); game-changing behemoths (the 6-foot-7, 285-pound Buchanan that season and 6-6, 310-pound Chris Jones today); safeties from Louisiana (Robinson then, Justin Reid now); and linebackers out of Notre Dame (Jim Lynch and Drue Tranquill). The significance of each defense also reflected a shift in offensive emphasis as the seasons went on. In 1969, Dawson suffered what was initially believed could be a season-ending knee injury in the second game of the season and missed the next five games, and later a sixth. A week later, backup Jacky Lee was injured, leaving the job to Mike Livingston, who hadn’t thrown a pass in a regular-season professional game to that point. “We are a complete football team directed to one purpose, and that is to win,” Stram had told the team in the days after Dawson’s injury, as MacCambridge noted in the book. “We are driving a Rolls Royce; all we have to do is keep it on the road.” But doing so became more contingent than ever on the defense, which gave up only 71 points in Livingston’s six starts — all of which were victories that buoyed the team until Dawson’s late return. And while the Chiefs still were second in the AFL in scoring that year, it nonetheless came with a conservative turn as the season unfolded. Contrary to what NFL Films would call Stram’s “wild west variety show” offensive inclinations, relative to the time, anyway, the prevailing theme much of the season was contouring the offense “not to lose the game.” A still-recovering Dawson threw just six passes, in fact, in the regular-season finale against the Raiders, a 10-6 loss that incidentally was every bit as disconcerting as this team’s last regular-season loss ... to the Raiders. Albeit for different reasons this season, a tightened-up version of the offense has evolved because of all the offensive challenges — particularly in the form of dropped passes and penalties — they’ve faced. Even if the offense hasn’t exactly gone vanilla, Mahomes’s cognizance of the defense’s value has compelled him to play with a prevailing first-do-no-harm mentality. He demonstrated that again in the second half against the Ravens, when he willingly took a sack rather than throw a risky pass or even throw the ball away with just over 6 minutes left to help drain the clock. And because he could count on a defense that has put the Chiefs in the position they’re in with its strongest presence since Super Bowl IV. No, it’s not the same overwhelming force that team enjoyed behind two of the top 100 players in NFL history (Lanier and Bell) and a group with a knack for the interception (32) this team just hasn’t generated (eight). Among plenty of other differences. But that group remains an enduring monument to the powers of complementary football. One that endures despite all the changes in the nature of the game that this season’s team has embraced as it seeks to create what would be one more meaningful parallel.
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