January 27, 2004 (morning)--For Chiefs fans, there’s an interesting lesson to be learned from watching the New England Patriots’ climb to their second Super Bowl in three years. And it has nothing to do with playing tough defense and preventing Colts’ quarterback Peyton Manning from getting into the kind of rhythm he got into against the Chiefs.

The lesson is this: Winning’s a good thing and losing’s a bad thing.

Now before you log off and figure you don’t need to read a web site to have your intelligence insulted, ask yourself if you were one of those fans who thought it would be a good idea for the Chiefs to lose a game during their undefeated start. Better to take the pressure off and lose now, the reasoning went, than lose in the playoffs.

I still haven’t figured out how you swap a loss in November for a win in January. And I’m sure that’s a question the Patriots never asked themselves.

The Patriots take a 14-game winning streak into the Super Bowl against the Carolina Panthers and it’s hard to see where they would have been better off interrupting their streak. I did, however, hear the same malarkey about the Patriots that I heard about the 9-0 Chiefs – that the Patriots weren’t a great team and the law of averages weighed heavily against them needing 15 straight wins to grab the Lombardi Trophy.

We all have this bad habit of trying to make sports more complicated than they are. It’s hard to find much fault with winning and it’s hard to find much consolation in losing. Winning, no matter how ugly, is almost always a sign of strength. Losing, no matter how gutsy the effort, is almost always a sign of weakness.

The Chiefs made that perfectly clear when they finally stumbled in a 24-19 loss at Cincinnati. As Bob Gretz detailed in a recent column on this site, the collapse of the Chiefs’ defense began in that game and was never reversed. That loss was not in any respect a helpful development for the Chiefs and they did not again resemble the NFL’s most impressive team, which they’d been during their hot start.

As far as the pressure of a winning streak goes, NFL players don’t feel it. That play-’em-one-game-at-a-time speech, which they’ve heard since they were eight years old, usually sinks in after a while. Sure, it’s possible for an undefeated team to get overconfident, but that’s why they have coaches screaming on the practice field.

Rest assured, NFL players feel a lot more pressure from a losing streak than a winning streak. Losing teams start wondering which coaches and teammates will still be around the same time next year.

The Patriots are on the verge of another Super Bowl title because of their remarkable consistency. Critics can claim all they want that the Patriots are not a great team, but a 15th straight win would define greatness better than any critic.

So the next time the Chiefs start 9-0 (don’t hold your breath, folks) you’d be best advised not to pray for a loss. If the 2003 season should have taught Chiefs fans anything, it’s to be extra careful about what they hope for. That first loss may not be the last one.

Believe me, if the Patriots lose Sunday, it will be because they ran into a better team. It will have nothing to do with the burden of a 14-game winning streak. All NFL teams should be fortunate enough to bear such a burden.