INTO THIN AIR, Part III: Why It’s (Nearly) Impossible to Win Three Straight Super Bowls

You're up, Kansas City. Michael MacCambridge examines whether Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid and Travis Kelce can achieve a first: Three straight Super Bowl titles. The challenge is steep, yet possible.

Aug 22, 2024

Here’s Part I and Part II, icymi.

The final installment, Part III, is below.

III | THE FUTURE

“You come at the king, you best not miss.”

—Michael K. Williams’ Omar, The Wire

To be in the middle of the maelstrom that is an NFL season is to know how fine the margins are, how cruel the breaks can be, and how often a tip, a slip, or a stumble can ruin even the best game plan. And that’s before the crucible of the playoffs, littered with great teams that fell short for one reason or another. Tony Dungy’s 2005 Colts — “the best team we had during my time there” — beat the Steelers by 19 points in the regular season, but lost to them in the divisional round of the AFC postseason. A year later, Dungy led a less well-rounded team to Super Bowl glory. The people who succeed in the NFL make their peace, sooner or later with the breaks of the game.

So every August, when he’s asked to predict the NFL’s next champion, Dungy has a firm policy:

“I never pick the defending champion,” he says. “I always pick the field.”

For much of the 2023 season, it appeared Dungy would be right for a 19th consecutive year. The Chiefs’ lackluster regular season looked like a classic example of good fortune running out. A spate of dropped passes plagued them in close losses to Detroit, Philadelphia and Green Bay. Kadarius Toney’s mental lapse led to an offside penalty that marred what otherwise would have been the play of the season — Travis Kelce’s catch and spontaneous lateral to Toney for a late touchdown that would have rallied the Chiefs past the Buffalo Bills in their regular-season showdown. By the time the Raiders throttled Kansas City in Arrowhead on Christmas Day — Kansas City’s fifth loss in eight games — many had left the defending champs for dead.

But then the Chiefs reset, buckled down to close the regular season with two wins, then secured their claim to dynasty with four rugged victories. Through a scintillating playoff run, they beat the teams ranked sixth (Miami), third (Buffalo), first (Baltimore) and second (San Francisco) by DVOA.

Just minutes after the stirring comeback win in Super Bowl LVIII, the mainstays of this team — future Hall of Famers Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Chris Jones — began pondering the future. Holding his daughter Sterling in his arms on the victory podium, Mahomes turned to fellow franchise cornerstone Jones and said, “We’re not done yet, dawg. I want three; no one’s ever gotten three. I want back-to-back-to-back.” Travis Kelce, in his podium interview, was on the same page. “The goal’s always been to get three,” he said. “But we couldn’t get here without getting to two — and having that target on our backs all year. We get a chance to do it three times in a row.”

Go Long will forever cover pro football through a longform lens.

Scanning the history of the other repeat Super Bowl victors, the Chiefs have managed to avoid some of the most obvious pitfalls. They’ve lost neither their legendary head coach, like the Packers in ’68 or the Cowboys in ’94, nor their franchise quarterback, like the Broncos in ’99. They’ve retained both their offensive and defensive coordinators, unlike the Dolphins of ‘74 and Patriots of ’05. They’ve also retained their leaders by restructuring and/or extending the contracts of Mahomes, Kelce and Jones over the past six months.

But the challenge awaiting them is complicated by all the trappings that surround the modern sports/entertainment/media universe. In today’s NFL, almost any story that is covered is going to be, by definition, over-covered. And this is the biggest, most obvious story of all, which creates its own challenges.

“Now they have to go through an entire season where all they’re going to talk about, all they’re going to think about, all they’re going to be judged by is whether they can win another Super Bowl,” says Billick. “It doesn’t matter how well you play during the regular season — and you have to guard against the players looking ahead to the playoffs. And then even in the playoffs, it makes no difference how well they play in the playoffs. Can they win the Super Bowl? So to be dismissive of all those games — the old idea of the Belichickian ‘It’s just all about this week’ — that's hard to do when you’re on the quest that they are, and that’s all anybody’s going to be talking about.”

Joe Greene, the expert who’s been down this road twice before, muses on the question of winning three in a row in the Twenty-First Century — whether the pressure is greater that it was in the past, or only different.

“I think it is different and greater,” he says. “I mean we had nobody chasing… what’s that girl’s name in the red all the time? Taylor Swift. Yeah, we had nobody hanging around like that. Now, Kelce could be one of the most level-headed guys they got. So I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt for being level-headed, but that’s a whole lot of stuff he’s got to deal with.”

“All those other distractions are factors,” says Accorsi. “I don’t think that’s going to be a factor with the Chiefs, though. I don’t think any of that stuff bothers them. They’ve got a head coach and a quarterback who I don’t think give one damn about any of that stuff. They’ve got the perfect personality. Now whether they do it or not, that’s something else. They’ve got to do it on the field.”

The other obstacles are numerous:

The Offseason. Despite revitalizing the receiving corps by signing Hollywood Brown and drafting Xavier Worthy, the Chiefs’ offseason has been mostly a symphony of bad vibes, interrupted by a few sweet moments with Travis and Taylor. It started when the team’s joyous Super Bowl parade was marred by gunfire that killed one longtime Chiefs fan, Lisa Lopez-Galvin. In late March, wideout Rashee Rice foolishly raced a rented Lamborghini through the North Central Expressway in Dallas, causing a multi-car collision, from which he then even more foolishly left the scene. The market for L’Jarius Sneed was softer than they’d hoped — a No. 3 in 2025 and a swap of seventh-round choices this year from the Titans. Tackle Wanya Morris, like Rice coming off his rookie campaign, was busted for marijuana possession. In April, citizens of Jackson County, Missouri voted down a bond proposal of stadium improvements for the Chiefs and Kansas City Royals. And that was all before Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker prompted a firestorm of criticism at Benedictine University when he delivered a commencement speech, the body of which was half pro-life jeremiad, half Handmaids’ Tale fan fiction.

Practice squad player Isaiah Buggs was implicated in an animal-cruelty case filed in Alabama, then a domestic violence case, then released. This month, as the team toiled in a typically tough Reid training camp on the campus of Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, Missouri, Chiefs Kingdom braced for the nearly inevitable suspension of Rice for violating the league’s personal-conduct policy. And then on the first play from scrimmage in the first preseason game, Brown suffered a sternoclavicular joint dislocation that could keep him out of action for more than a month.

The Competition. The AFC in 2024 will be a battle royal. Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac has eight of the 12 best teams in pro football coming out of the AFC, vying for the conference’s seven playoff spots. In a recent survey of 80 coaches, scouts and executives conducted by ESPN, seven of the top eight quarterbacks in football came from the AFC. The conference is loaded with worthy rivals to Mahomes, from two-time MVP Lamar Jackson, the Bills’ hyper-talented (and sometimes just hyper) Josh Allen, Chiefs-slayer Joe Burrow, four-time MVP, ayahuasca pitchman Aaron Rodgers, and young guns like C.J. Stroud, Trevor Lawrence, Justin Herbert and Tua Tagovailova.

“How many of those teams do you have to go through?” asks Billick. “And certainly in the AFC, there’s a lot more of them than in the NFC. And those other teams have dynamic quarterbacks that can win a game, and they’re well coached as well. So they have the same circumstance as the Chiefs. And again, I don’t want to intimate that the Chiefs have just been lucky to beat Baltimore or Buffalo and any other teams. But those other teams are also good teams, and the question is if they are both good teams, if both teams have quarterbacks who can take over a game — then who's going to be the luckiest?”

While the Chiefs’ dynasty has come on the heels of the Patriots’ era of dominance, it feels different. With the exception of an overzealous mayor in Cincinnati, the trash talk has all been fairly respectful. The Chiefs may never be hated as much as the Patriots were — and not just because they don’t have the Deflategate and Spygate scandals haunting their legacy. Kansas City has been a consistently entertaining team to watch, Reid is more personable than Belichick, and Mahomes seems a more relatable field general than Tom Brady.

Which doesn’t mean that teams and fan bases haven’t spent years yearning to see the Chiefs get their comeuppance. After six seasons of constant excellence, Mahomes reported — on the day of the divisional playoff in Buffalo — driving to the stadium and seeing “40,000 middle fingers.” The Raiders brought a Kermit the Frog puppet to training camp, decked out in a Chiefs jersey and Mahomes broccoli-top hairdo. He seemed untroubled by the mockery. But check back Week 8 to see how that all worked out.

Their potential Achilles’ heel. The offense should be better in 2024, but given the variability of defensive performance, it’s unlikely that the Chiefs will be as strong defensively. They lose hard-as-nails cornerback Sneed, mobile linebacker Willie Gay, and safety Mike Edwards. Some have expressed concern about the secondary.

Yet don’t be surprised if what rivals focus most on is exploiting the Chiefs’ run defense. Many see it as the key to beating Kansas City. In each of their last eight losses dating back to 2022, the Chiefs have given up more than 100 yards on the ground. Over those games, opponents averaged 31 carries for 131 yards and 4.3 yards per carry. As terrific as Steve Spagnuolo’s defense was last year — second overall in points allowed — they were last in the NFL in average rushing yards allowed before contact (2.44), and surrendered five yards or more on 44 percent of their runs.

Consider as well that for many teams that have lost to the Chiefs in the playoffs, there has been a common theme of postmortem regret: Why didn’t we keep running the ball? In the 2022 AFC Championship Game, Cincinnati had the ball with 2:30 left in a tie game, and called seven consecutive pass plays (one resulting in a Joe Burrow scramble, the last in a crucial Chris Jones sack) before punting the ball away, setting the stage for the Chiefs’ game-winning field goal. A year later, in the Ravens-Chiefs conference championship game, Baltimore’s top-ranked rushing offense ran the ball just 16 times. Near the end of regulation of Super Bowl LVIII, with the 49ers driving into Kansas City territory, and gaining chunks on the ground, the 49ers — too clever by half — abandoned the run and found their drive stifled, leaving Mahomes & Co. time to drive for the tying field goal.

The new season could see more rivals prioritizing attacking the Chiefs’ run defense. It is also, and not incidentally, the M.O. of the new Chargers’ coach Jim Harbaugh, who drafted stud tackle Joe Alt in the first round, hired an offensive coordinator (Greg Roman) who specializes in the run game, and has made clear that the best way to support the brilliant if injury-prone Justin Herbert is to give him a smashmouth running game, from which Herbert can then have potentially devastating play-action options to the Chargers’ mediocre set of receivers. Meanwhile, the Ravens have reloaded with Derrick Henry at running back. And the Bills — who somehow managed to run for 182 yards and possess the ball for more than 37 minutes at home and still lose to the Chiefs in the playoffs — also have rededicated themselves to bolstering their ground game.

The Schedule. Typical for any champion in the 17-game era, the Chiefs’ schedule is punishing, with five games against other division champions, but also a concerning early bye (Week 6) and a short week (Saturday, Dec. 21 game against the Texans) followed by an even shorter week (Wednesday, Christmas Day, at the Steelers). The Chiefs play games on every day of the week except Tuesday this season. It is another one of those price-of-success variables, the subtle detriments that can prove an obstacle for teams trying to repeat, or three-peat.

“We make it harder,” says Dungy, of the position schedule setup, and he adds that being the de facto America’s Team of the 2020s further means the luxury of a set schedule and a steady routine are also out the window for the Chiefs, who play on Christmas Day for the second year in a row. “When you talk about intangibles, now you’re playing Thursday night, on the road on Sunday night. Every team is targeting you on their schedule.”

Fine margins. There are Chiefs fans who will point out that they are an inexplicable Dee Ford offside call (in the 2018 AFC Championship Game) and Chris Jones missing an easy sack on Burrow (in the 2021 AFC Championship Game) from going to six straight Super Bowls. This is true, but it’s equally true that they are arguably only a few plays — Jimmy Garoppolo overthrowing a wide-open Emmanuel Sanders late in Super Bowl LIV, the crucial defensive holding call on the Eagles’ James Bradbury near the end of Super Bowl LVII, and the 49ers line blowing an assignment on third down near the goal line last February — away from the Chiefs losing all four of the Super Bowls they’ve played in over the past five seasons.

In each of their three Super Bowl wins since the 2019 season, Kansas City has been down by double digits, a statistic that underscores the otherworldly clutch talents of Mahomes even as it also highlights that the Chiefs have not been as dominant as many of their predecessors. The Packers won consecutive Super Bowls by 44 points, the Dolphins by 38, the Steelers by 14 and 15, the 49ers by 49, the Cowboys by 52, the Broncos by 22. But then we come to the new century, where free agency and the salary cap are fully implemented: The Patriots’ margin of victory in their back-to-back Super Bowl wins, like the Chiefs back-to-back Super Bowl wins 19 seasons later, totaled just six points. Razor thin margins.

“That narrow margin of victory — you let teams stay close, and all of a sudden they feel like they’re just as good as you,” says Tedy Bruschi. “And in football, it’s correct that on any given Sunday, there’s a handful of plays, and if you cannot be the team that makes ’em, I don’t care how good you are, you’re beatable.”

Of course, the Chiefs also face the daunting challenge with their share of advantages:

Youth. It is a testament to the job that general manager Brett Veach has done that only three starters — the core trio of Mahomes, Kelce and Jones — remain from the Chiefs team that won Super Bowl LIV five seasons ago. Bolstered by the 2022 offseason trade that sent Tyreek Hill to Miami for a raft of draft choices, the average age of Kansas City’s starting lineup the past two seasons was 25.6 and 26.0, younger than the average of any starting lineup of the other repeat champions. With further roster churn, Kansas City goes into the 2024 season with the third youngest roster in the NFL, according to Spotrac numbers, unprecedented for a team coming off two Super Bowl wins.

But Also Experience. Despite their collective youth, the Chiefs’ projected starting lineup owns 47 Super Bowl rings already. And under the guiding hand of the steady Reid, Mahomes, Kelce and Jones have exerted an outsized influence on their 50 teammates each year. What has emerged is a seasoned, self-possessed team that rises to the occasion and limits mistakes in crucial situations.

Bruschi was watching last season’s AFC Championship when, in a post-whistle fracas late in the first half, Kelce goaded the Ravens’ Kyle Van Noy into a head-butt and a personal foul for unnecessary roughness, earning 15 precious yards in a drive that ended with the Chiefs kicking a field goal to take a 10-point lead. Bruschi recognized something in the collective will of the Chiefs that felt very familiar.

“To win it again, I think you just come to a point where you know what other teams just don’t know — how to win games when it matters,” Bruschi says. “I see the Ravens, they’re head-butting, getting penalties and doing stupid things. And then there was a moment where Travis Kelce laughed, when he forced a personal foul penalty. And I’m like, ‘That’s a laugh and a feeling that I’ve had before, when the other team just doesn’t know what it takes.’ That’s the sort of attitude that back-to-back champions or dynastic champions have.”

The Coach. Andy Reid is in uncharted territory. He will be attempting the three-peat at a far different juncture of his career than any coach before him. Winning back-to-back Super Bowls has generally occurred much earlier in coaching careers. Among the coaches that presided over consecutive Super Bowl winners — Vince Lombardi, Don Shula, Chuck Noll twice, Jimmy Johnson, Mike Shanahan and Bill Belichick — they ranged in ages during their repeat seasons from 43 to 54, and in NFL head coaching experience from five years to 11 years. But Reid presided over the Chiefs’ repeat at the age of 65, in his twenty-fifth season as a head coach (and the eleventh as the Chiefs head coach). No one else has faced this challenge at this advanced age, or this deep into a certain Hall of Fame coaching career.

Unlike many other aging coaching legends, Reid has remained on the cutting edge, as one of the preeminent innovators of this or any other era. “By the way, Andy Reid is an assassin,” says Eric Davis. “He may look a nice old man, but he’s trying to get a defensive coordinator fired every week.”

“Andy is different — he does still connect with his guys,” says Dungy. “I’ve been in that locker room after games, I’ve been around before games and they have a bond with him. They believe in him and he’s been able to keep that. And that’s unusual to have that same drive and same ability to connect with people, whether you’re a 30-year-old assistant in Green Bay or a 60-year-old head coach in Kansas City. It is definitely not the rule, but I wouldn’t think that his age or his longevity is going to hurt him in this quest right here. He’s absolutely doing the same things he did 15 years ago in terms of game plans, and being on top of things, and connecting with his team and motivating and having them want to play for him.” Also, great quarterbacks keep great coaches young.

Which brings us to one last variable that is decidedly different from any of the predecessors.

Patrick Lavon Mahomes II. Take a look at the quarterbacks who’ve piloted back-to-back Super Bowl wins: Starr. Griese. Bradshaw. Montana. Aikman. Elway. Brady. All of Mahomes’ predecessors are Hall of Famers, or in Brady’s case will be as soon as he’s eligible.

But none of them were quite so clearly the best quarterback of his era, in his prime, in the way that Mahomes is. In six seasons as a starter, he has played an entire season of postseason games, and his record stands at a staggering 15-3. He played heroically in two of those three losses, too.

Yet everything we know about how closely bunched the contenders are in the NFL, how unsustainable runs of good fortune are, how common season-ending injuries can be, and how wildly competitive the league is serves to underscore the limited amount of influence that any one player — even a legendary quarterback — can exert on the ultimate team game.

The promise of Patrick Mahomes is that, when he’s at his best, it sometimes seems as though none of the above is true. He tips the outcome of a game more than perhaps any other player in the two-platoon era of pro football.

Ernie Accorsi resides in Hershey, Pa., these days, surrounded by Eagles fans. Two years ago, as Philadelphia marched to the Super Bowl to face the Chiefs, he was besieged by fans giddy with expectations that Jalen Hurts and the Eagles would carry the day.

“I had all these Eagle fans around here when they were in the Super Bowl with Kansas City,” says Accorsi. “They’re all jumping all over the place on Saturday and people keep asking, who’s going to win? I said, ‘You just better hope that Patrick Mahomes doesn’t have the ball with two minutes to go on his own 20 yard line. Because if he does, the game’s over. You can turn your TV off.’ That's exactly what he did.”

Remember, Mahomes did that despite playing two full games on a high-ankle sprain that was further aggravated late in the first half of the Super Bowl. After the game, Mahomes’ father Pat Mahomes, Sr., articulated the moment as well as anyone. Crying tears of joy and pride when he hugged his son, the senior Mahomes said, “I ain’t ever seen nothing like you. You different!”

A year later, after the gut-check, career-defining road wins at Buffalo and Baltimore, Mahomes rose to the occasion to torment the San Francisco 49ers in another Super Bowl. His formidable presence — the mystique of Mahomes — informed the conclusion of that game. Even amid the celebrations on the San Francisco bench after the 49ers scored the go-ahead field goal with 1:53 left in regulation, offensive tackle Trent Williams could be heard fretting, “I’m sick to give Mahomes a two-minute drive in the fourth quarter.” Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Joe Burrow and several others know the feeling. Williams and the world watched as Mahomes rallied the Chiefs for a game-tying field goal at the end of regulation, and then completed all seven passes, and converted a “match-point” fourth-and-one keeper on the overtime drive to topple the 49ers.

It may be that true that, in the moment, both fans and the media tend to overrate individual accomplishments while not fully grasping the significance of team accomplishments. Which prompts a question: If the Chiefs were to do it, and win a third straight Super Bowl, where would that rank in the pantheon of the NFL’s dynasties?

“I have a feeling it would surpass either one of Green Bay’s three in a rows,” says Joel Bussert. “Just because it is harder in a bigger league. Winning a single championship is harder in a 32-team league than in a 12-team league and so forth. So yeah, I’d say if they get a third, I think it surpasses anything anybody else has done.”

The challenge facing the Chiefs is monumental. If you had to choose between the Chiefs and the field, you’d have to gravitate to the same common-sense conclusion as Tony Dungy: bet the field. The more you know about football and the National Football League, the more you appreciate the enormity of what the Chiefs have already accomplished, and the mountain in front of them. To know football is to know all the myriad things that could affect it. A significant decline by Chris Jones, who just turned 30, or Travis Kelce, about to turn 35. An Andy Reid health scare. Or if the famously pliable and loose-jointed Mahomes were to come down with a serious injury.

The Chiefs may not have the dominating defense of the Steelers in the ’70s, or the deep roster of the 49ers in the ’80s, or the All-Pro glutted offensive machine of the Cowboys in the ’90s. But collectively, across too many games for it to be a coincidence, they have exhibited the heart of a champion, and have shown an aptitude for coping with the dangers of success.

“You win a Super Bowl,” says Joe Greene, “and you got everybody patting you on the back, guys are being called to do commercials and speaking engagements, they’re getting paid money that some of them have never had before. That’s something that all these teams have to deal with, after winning. The adulation that they get. The quarterback in Kansas City, he doesn’t care — it doesn’t bother him. The guy that he’s throwing to, it doesn’t bother him, either. They get it.”

Even Dungy, ever the skeptic, allows that the possibility of a three-peat is real, reminding him of other legends in another sport. “I think the Chiefs have the best chance of any of these teams that have gone before,” he says. “They’ve got Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan. With those two, all these other things can go wrong, and you still have the opportunity to succeed — and that’s what happened last year. So many things went wrong, and they won it anyway. Any other coach or any other quarterback, and the Chiefs don’t win that Super Bowl.”

The road is long, and the odds of even making it back to the Super Bowl are formidable. But we are witnessing greatness, and the epic journey promises to be dramatic, however it turns out.

“This game is all about matchups,” says Eric Davis, “but the wild card is that you can’t teach, coach or somewhat even game-plan for what Patrick Mahomes does. I think it’s going to be very difficult for them, for all of the reasons that we said already. Health is the first thing that I am going to put up there. Are you going to have your key guys healthy in the moments that matter, in the games that matter? So if I had to put money on it, history says it’s not going to get done.”

He pauses for one more moment, then adds one caveat:

“With that being said, if the Chiefs made it back to the Super Bowl again — well, I wouldn’t bet against them.”

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Michael MacCambridge (@maccambridge) is the author of “America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured A Nation” and other books. Ana Sofia Meyer and Emmanuel Ramirez provided research assistance for this article.

ICYMI, our 2024 NFL Season Preview features at Go Long:

Ben W

Aug 22

Have loved this entire series. Could do without the moralizing around Butker's speech which seems to have had more of an effect on everyone outside the locker room rather than those within it.

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