This past season represented the 60th year for the Chiefs in Kansas City. Over the year, we highlighted some of the history of the franchise since Lamar Hunt officially announced on February 8, 1963, that his team was coming to town. This is Part 9 and the final entry in the series.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight
Lamar Hunt never lived to see his franchise return to the Super Bowl. He passed away on
December 13, 2006, and the mantle of leadership passed to his children, led by Clark Hunt, who became the club's chairman of the board.
It has been a little more than 60 years since Hunt brought his football franchise to Kansas City and realized a world championship following the 1969 season. It would take 50 years since then to realize a second world championship, but only four more to achieve back-to-back titles for the first time in NFL history in 19 years.
After coming up an overtime short of reaching the Super Bowl in 2018, Head Coach Andy Reid's team raised the Lamar Hunt Trophy, named after its founder, the following year and reached the Super Bowl for the first time in 50 years.
With one of the best all-around rosters in the NFL – led by league MVP quarterback Patrick Mahomes – the Chiefs took home the NFL crown in 2019 and eventually reached four Super Bowls over a five-year span, topping the AFC West for eight consecutive seasons, and winning championships again in 2022 and 2023.
Sports do not always build character, but they most certainly reveal it. There could be no more quibbling over when Kansas City might reach a Super Bowl or if Andy Reid was the right man to take the Chiefs there.
The scale and speed of the franchise's rise as an offensive power was something so startling that no one could quite believe that it had happened. With an improved defense under the direction of coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, Kansas City was a formidable force to be reckoned with now on both sides of the ball.
And if the fans were thrilled with their team's achievements, then so too did many feel unease, some doing what they had always done comparing the present to the past. But the struggles, particularly on offense, that had plagued the franchise throughout the '70s, '80s, and even in the successful '90s in Kansas City, were soon forgotten.
No Chiefs quarterback had played the game like Patrick Mahomes. When he was on his game, it was like watching a star go nova on the field. Sports strain to stress to us that we are watching history, and Reid's Chiefs didn't want to let slip the opportunity to make that literal.
"The end crowns all," Shakespeare had written. "And that old common denominator, Time, will end it."
It was time, and what had once been a dream was to become a reality and it would forever after be. Where once there was a chance, there was now history. Where once there was feeling, there was now fact.
The Kansas City Chiefs were world champions not once again, but three more times, and a grateful city could take pride in that and for Lamar Hunt who had brought them a professional football franchise 60 years ago.
