It’s more than a bit odd – not to mention unfair – that Tyler Thigpen, a player few people if any gave more than a minute’s notice to back at training camp, now carries the hopes of the Chiefs nation on his small shoulders. Listen closely while you’re out shopping or standing in line at Starbucks and you’ll hear it when people talk about the Chiefs.

Thigpen and former Chiefs quarterback and later NFL MVP of the Oakland Raiders, Rich Gannon, have similar stories. Gannon came to the Chiefs as a free agent and didn’t garner more than a cursory mention at his signing but later when he stepped onto the field to fill in for an injured Elvis Grbac he was seen as a savior, and eventually when he left town as a free agent to join the Oakland Raiders there was a huge outcry. Thigpen joined the franchise on a waiver claim from the Minnesota Vikings where he had been a lowly seventh round pick. To no surprise, there was no hoopla or even a “what a steal” commentary from anybody local.

Again and again in the stories told near and far from the earliest of time we come across a certain image which seems to hold a peculiar fascination for all people. We see an ordinary, insignificant person, unknown to most people and who very little is expected, who suddenly steps to the center of the stage and is revealed to be someone quite exceptional.

Few images in the popular storytelling culture have fixed themselves more vividly in the mind than the moment when Clark Kent, the bespectacled newspaper reporter, is suddenly transformed into “Superman,” the all-powerful righter of the world’s wrongs. Somehow the moment of transformation when this fellow emerges has a strange power to move us.

Thigpen’s story, while not the classic “Rags to Riches” tale, carries a fair amount of lure. That he is a young player, only 24 years old, and comes from a school that didn’t even have football until he got there, and that he was a late draft choice and one not taken by the Chiefs makes his tale an even more intriguing one. Here is, after all, a player out of Coastal Carolina, not North Carolina or even East Carolina.

Is it fair to lay so much so soon at the feet of one so young and inexperienced? Unlike Gannon, whose supporting cast here and in Oakland was a solid one, or his fellow contemporaries Joe Flacco at Baltimore and Matt Ryan at Atlanta, Thigpen is expected to have to win games for Kansas City. Every pass that falls short, is dropped or floats over the head of a receiver is met with gasps from the crowd. These are not angry gasps. The fans know his pedigree. It’s just that they’ve seen him lead the team in very competitive games and the difference in the team right now may very well be at the quarterback position, or so many fans think. In games against fellow veteran signal callers, Brett Favre, Jeff Garcia and Drew Brees, he’s more than held his own.

But to expect Thigpen to have to win the games on his own is asking too much. Flacco and Ryan can count on solid defenses and good running games to help them and it limits the pressure. Baltimore’s defense ranks third and Atlanta’s rushing game is second. Consequently, their performances are measured in smaller doses than Thigpen’s. Moreover, they’re first round picks. Thigpen was a seventh.

In the classic “Rags to Riches” story, author Christopher Booker writes in his book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories, that heroes are “rewarded with their first, limited success, and may have some prevision of their eventual glorious destiny.” Perhaps a lasting glory will be the eventual climax to the Thigpen story, but Booker also warns that as the story continues there is always a “central crisis where everything suddenly goes wrong.”

Thigpen hasn’t had his “central crisis” yet, but it’s sure to come as it comes to all young players. He’s a young quarterback leading a team that’s had 36 different starters so far this year and that’s more responsibility than even a veteran Super Bowl quarterback should have to bear much less be asked to overcome.