Who’ll Stop The Reign?

Isaiah Likely's toe-and-a-shade-more, in and of itself and ever so slightly over the line at the back of the end zone, does not have the same historical import of, say, Kevin Durant's in the 2021 Eastern Conference semifinals. The Baltimore Ravens have 16 more games to prove their worth while those Brooklyn Nets went right to powersuck in a heartbeat, and by extension the Ravens could still affirm Lamar Jackson's place somewhere near the top of the universe. Observing the NFL has been reduced by its simpleton punditocracy to quarterbacks plus some other stuff, because the game itself is apparently too involved to make us think about more than just the one position. Every now and then, though, a big tight end’s big toe can be momentarily significant.

The NFL’s rolling Chief Show was not what the audience wanted from Thursday night's season opener. It wanted Likely to have both feet fully inside the white paint so that the compelling game everyone received could go on a little bit longer. Probably not that much longer—even in that universe where Likely, the Ravens' Kelce-in-training, gets credit for the touchdown he surely had scored, the Ravens probably push it all in on a two-point conversion try that either wins or loses the game. That would have been an act of starkest clarity that made people think more fondly of Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, but it is also academic. The good news was that last night’s game was so compelling that we would have signed up for 10 more minutes of it. The bad news was that it ended in anticlimax. Likely's toe was a quarter-inch too prominent and so a spectacular denouement shriveled to referee Shaun Hochuli declaring that Likely's heroics weren't heroics at all, and that everyone would have to clear the stadium and their living rooms. It was that rare case where virtually all of America’s unaffiliated millions of viewers would have preferred the incorrect call.

More than that, though, the game ended with the crushing realization, after only one game, that the Chiefs are still as good as ever and maybe even a bit better than that, and that everyone is going to spend most of the next six months fighting various forms of Chief Fatigue.

We’ll exempt Chief fans from this diagnosis. They are already too far gone and too pot-committed to want anything else; if you think otherwise, go back to those stock shots during the game of fans at GEHA Field behaving like people who would have the cops sicced on them in any other circumstance. Those are the worst moments in American entertainment, when the cameras pan the audience and essentially demand that its members distend their neck veins into extended versions of a lizard's gular fold. It is now expected in all games, and therefore becomes a learned behavior. In the director's booth and in the stands, these are crimes.

But you can see and feel that fatigue everywhere else. The Chiefs have won two consecutive Super Bowls and are trying to be the first team to win thrice in succession since the mid-’60s Packers. They have the best quarterback on the basis of both design and improvisational skills in P.L. Mahomes, the best coach on the basis of both tactical design and mustache size in A.W. Reid, and they just found a new world's fastest threat to extend Mahomes's and Reid's respective shelf lives in rookie receiver X.G. Worthy. They look like the team everyone picks to win the Super Bowl with a heavy sigh attached, and maybe a wish that someone else could shake the narrative that we've all already seen twice. They are, in their inexorability, the New And Only Mildly Less Oppressive Patriots.

The Ravens, though, offered a weird yet appealing counter to that for much of the night. There are other contenders for the throne, to be sure, but the likeliest of those, the San Francisco 49ers, have already tried the Chiefs twice and been found wanting; their window is closing in a flurry of star holdouts that just ended, a promising young wide receiver missing the start of the season with gunshot wounds, and their own kind of public fatigue as they are shoved into the role of a silver medalist in a perpetual and fruitless hunt for a gold.

It all comes down to the fact that the American football diaspora wants the next new thing, whatever it is. It has seen the Chiefs at their rampant best for the last two years, and been appropriately awed. But it is also hankering either for a new story or a different twist to the old one. Our attention spans are not built for this. People like dynasties, but only after they end. Imagine how much the Golden State Warriors would have been despised then, and admired now, if they hadn't gone radio silent in the final five minutes of the 2016 NBA Finals and won four straight. Winning twice in a row and then getting Kevin Durant would have been over-overkill.

And we may be there now with this Chiefs team. Mahomes, Reid, Worthy, Chris Jones, KelceSwift Omnicorp—it's a tape loop for the post-tape society. Football has been riding this excruciating high for years now through multiple dynasties; the last one, New England, is now going to go through withdrawals the rest of the nation will find endlessly entertaining. The Chiefs, on the other hand, are still atop a wave that people fear might not crest the way the ones that once carried the Patriots, Broncos, 49ers, and Cowboys did. Losing the third straight Super Bowl was what kept those near-dynasts from being too much to bear; if there’s a macro-scale story that will ride over the whole NFL this year, it’s the search for a team that might be able to fill that role where the Chiefs are concerned.

All this because Isaiah Likely does not have a retractable big toe, or at least a shrink-on-command shoe. You probably didn't think that the apocalypse could come this soon in the season, but the NFL is in the business of selling you 285 apocalypses a year. We already fear that 20 of them are going to look a lot like the ones we've already seen.