DAWES: Blood, Sweat, And Lots Of Tears

Jan 03, 2005, 10:30:51 AM by Rufus Dawes - FAQ

It’s been a tough year and, in many ways, an unforgiving one. The team’s winning surge down the backstretch was too late for some fans and for more media and the final game in San Diego was, well, there’s no nice way to say it, so let’s leave it at this: depressing. Regrettably, they saved their worst for last.

Making all due allowances for the way the season wound down, few impartial or fair-minded observers can resist the conclusion that despite the results over the closing month, it wasn’t enough to make 2004 anything but a disappointing season. Who cares about a strong finish when the finish line was the regular season and not the playoffs? It’s a fair question. This team had problems.

To start with, there were the tactical misfires that happen during every season – the simple blunders, miscues and general accidents that are far more common in every team than coaches would wish. These are somewhat important and can change the course of a season, but there isn’t much to be done about them but to list them, and move on. One cost, however, of the kind of high-wire, high-risk strategy that the coaches have chosen is that these kinds of mistakes can be even more expensive than usual when the time is short, the issues are hot, and the stakes are high.

“It’s one of the first times in my career that I didn’t feel that the team performed up to it’s potential,” Vermeil said on his radio show last night. For a man as optimistic as Vermeil, that spoke volumes.

Among the mistakes that turned out to be the most costly, of course, was the slow start by the offense and the failure of a now aggressive defense to improve. The offense set or tied six NFL records and established or tied 19 team single-season records but those are lost in the team’s final record. “The only record that really counts is the win-loss record,” Vermeil said yesterday, “not how many yards, points, first downs, receptions you make.” The defense didn’t improve in any meaningful way with the exception of the public face of the players – they stuck together and there were none of the nasty incidents like the team experienced in Minneapolis a year ago.

No, the question of team character has been answered. No one can doubt the quality of the young men in Kansas City’s employ. But can they match that image with a winning on-the-field performance? Can they become consistent winners again? And if not last year, when? Vermeil has slaked the public’s thirst with his enthusiastic optimism, but the public’s enthusiasm wanes. It’s easy to believe that the team can turn around last year’s results but we won’t go into 2005 with any of the high hopes that last year’s off-season brought.

Maybe Winston Churchill’s method is best: promise blood, toil, tears and sweat. If things work out, good for you. But if there is trouble later, at least people do not lose confidence in your ability to fight on. In the final analysis, fight was about the only thing we could consistently count on.

The columnists of www.kcchiefs.com will give attention to what the Chiefs must do for the future in the week ahead.

The opinions offered in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Kansas City Chiefs.

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Prodigiously well-researched, informative and opinionated, Rufus Dawes examines media coverage of the Chiefs occasionally throughout the year.