ORCHARD PARK, N.Y.—Andy Reid pulled a black mid-size Moleskine journal with the NFL logo on the front cover out of his travel bag around 10:30 Sunday night. Kansas City 27, Buffalo 24 (“an instant classic,” Travis Kelce said, in what may have been the understatement of the day) had been over for 50 minutes, but Reid wanted to savor his 282nd career victory for a few minutes. The team bus could wait.
He opened the journal. His entry for Sunday was in red rollerball ink, in tidy and compact cursive. Reid wrote in his room at the Buffalo Hyatt, relaxing in the hours before the game.
Sunday’s subjects: This game would be won on the lines — a cliché, he knew, but he’d faced the Bills six times over the past four seasons, and he knew these games are always so close that it’d come down to a point late in the game when the team that won the line of scrimmage would win the game. And at some point, the weather (14-degree wind chill, blowing light flurries) would play a role in ball security.
“I’ve been doing this since 11th grade,” he said. “I really like it. I think it helps me.”
Let’s test Reid. Scrimmage superiority: Early in the fourth quarter, Bills up 24-20, KC with first-and-goal at the Buffalo four-yard line. Patrick Mahomes handed it to Isiah Pacheco. Center Creed Humphrey and right guard Trey Smith each pancaked his man. Touchdown. Meanwhile, KC sniffed out a fake punt run on the next series, and Buffalo running backs rushed three times for minus-3 yards in the fourth quarter.
Weather: Kansas City nearly blew the game when Mecole Hardman, inches from the goal line, fumbled the ball into and out of the end zone. Josh Allen had a huge fumble with five minutes left but Buffalo recovered. Balls were bricks. Four fumbles on the day.
Reid put the Moleskine back in his bag. I asked him what was special about this great football game, the first pre-Super Bowl road playoff game in the Mahomes/Reid Era.
“The competition,” he said. “The crowd. Special. This environment here is like crazy from throwing snowballs and hitting our bus before the game started. Flipping us off as we came in. During the game, they were loud, so loud. You know how they sing the last part of that National Anthem? They were trying to make sure you couldn’t hear our fans say, ‘Chieeeeeefs’ in there.”
“Land of the free and home of the Chieeeeefs, right?” I said.
“Right,” Reid said. “Our fans, there weren’t a ton of them, but they fought like crazy to get that ‘Chiefs’ in there. I was proud of that. But the environment, this environment, is football. It’s NFL football. Like Arrowhead. NFL football at its best. That’s what we felt out there for three hours, for all of three hours.”
Then there’s Mahomes and Josh Allen. Perfect together. And Travis Kelce scoring two touchdowns — one conjuring up the good old days with Alex Smith — and flashing the heart sign to GF Taylor Swift in her box upstairs. And Jason Kelce, bare-chested, looking like a marauding brown bear, pounding beers in the stands. And the embittered Buffalo fans, once again going into the bitter western New York winter Super Bowl-less.
“Every f---ing year!” one fan bellowed over and over as the stadium emptied out.
“WIDE RIGHT! AGAIN!” another yelled.
As always, the sudden, awful finality of a season’s end for one contender, the thrill of victory for the other. It’s agonizing. It’s exhilarating. It’s sports, at the highest level.
***
Strange being in Highmark Stadium, and walking down through the crowd — that’s the way it is at this old Bills stadium — to the locker room. You hear the crowd. You feel the crowd. And the feeling in the bitter cold Sunday was anger. These fans were pissed off. My friend Albert Breer heard a fan say, “I’m gonna go waterboard myself.”
I heard: “We SUCK!” … “OUR SPECIAL TEAMS BLOW!” … “Why? Why should we keep coming back!” … “Where are you, Scott Norwood!” And various forms of anger toward the kicker, Tyler Bass, who missed a 44-year field goal to tie in the final two minutes. No need to disparage the guy and make him feel worse than he must be feeling this morning.
Then, down to the tunnel, where the players from both teams were filing in. The Bills, like going down the aisle solemnly in a funeral home, going into their room to the left. The visitors, floating and preening, headed to the right. “We running it back baby!!!!” yelled KC safety Justin Reid. GM Brett Veach and Mahomes had an intense two-second hug, a defiant Mahomes giving the kind of glare he never lets the cameras see, deliriously happy.
This hit me in the locker room: a corner of the room, with Mahomes, backup Blaine Gabbert, kicker Harrison Butker and a couple of others, discussing where they were when Tyler Bass missed the fairly easy field goal that would have tied it. “It just, just FROZE IN THE AIR,” Mahomes said.
“Man,” Butker told me, “I feel for Tyler. Life of a kicker. We’ve all been there.”
Travis Kelce’s locker now. He gave me a fist bump as he sprint-dressed-packed and said he wasn’t talking; a team aide had a cart waiting, to get him to Tayler Swift and one other famous person in the entourage, brother Jason. The Other Kelce had quite a day slamming light beers in the stadium.
“Great Lakes guys,” Travis Kelce said quietly to me. He and his bro, Cleveland guys, down the southern coast of Lake Erie from Buffalo. “You bring us home, and anything can happen.”
When I told him, “What a friggin’ game,” Travis Kelce, in the middle of hurriedly packing his bag, said, “With these two teams, these two guys, Josh and Patty, man, instant classic. These are the moments you miss in the off-season. It’s why you play the game.”
I saw Mahomes walking through the room. “I love Arrowhead—I love playoff games at Arrowhead,” he said. “But man, that was fun.”
Crazy things happened here. After the Pacheco touchdown produced the final score, no one scored for the final 14 minutes. Football’s odd that way; for 46 minutes, you see 51 points and five lead changes. In the last 14 minutes, zero points, zero lead changes. There was a failed fake punt, a fumble out of the end zone, a Bills punt, a KC punt, a Bills fumble and recovery, and then the fateful Tyler Bass missed 44-yard field goal.
Some 33 years ago, Scott Norwood missed a 47-yard field goal 18 inches wide right in the Super Bowl. Now Bass missed by a bigger margin. No wonder these fans think they’ll never win a title. Normal kickers missing makeable kicks, plunging a region that is so desperate to win into a months-long depression. I figure they’ll come out of it, oh, around training camp in late July.
As for the visitors, this was the first Mahomes-Reid playoff road game in their time atop this franchise after 12 in Arrowhead. Obviously, teams love home playoff games. But I reminded Reid of the old Bill Walshism. He loved playing on the road. “It’s 53 guys and a coaching staff against a team, a city, a state, a region,” Walsh told one of his 49ers team in the eighties. Walsh always felt it gave a good team a chance to galvanize, and the Niners always had good road records in part because of it. Well, having Joe Montana playing quarterback helped.
In the same way, Mahomes helps. Kelce caught TD passes of 22 and three yards, the second being a play Reid hadn’t had in a gameplan since Alex Smith played quarterback when Kelce was a young tight end. The play, called Flash Screen, was designed a decade ago for Smith to be able to hit Kelce on a short throw so he could make something happen after the catch. “We put it back in this week,” Reid said. “We practiced it this week, and Kelce kept asking for it --‘Can we get that back in? Can we get the Flash back?’ I said, ‘Yeah, okay, we’ll do it.’ Worked perfectly.”
So now Reid and his coordinator, Matt Nagy, will have to come up with something to attack in the AFC Championship Game. It’s KC against the talented, and astute, Ravens. “I love Lamar Jackson,” Reid said. “Patrick really likes him.” The game loves quarterback rivalries like this one. It’s odd. Thirty years ago, it was Elway-Marino. Fifteen years ago, Brady-Manning. Now, most of these rivalries feature two mobile quarterbacks. Times change but the players, and the game, are still great.
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.