Why the Kansas City Chiefs’ quest for first-ever Super Bowl three-peat is so daunting

In the buoyant clatter of the Chiefs’ locker room, after the last practice before the season begins, rookie running back Carson Steele considered the moment at hand.

He thought about how best to harness the emotional surge he’ll feel when he takes the field Thursday night for the Chiefs’ NFL opener against the visiting Baltimore Ravens at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.

“Act like I’ve been in that situation before,” he said Tuesday.

With a laugh, he added, “Act like it.”

As much as Steele and other newcomers might feel like they’ve got to adapt into the established culture engineered by coach Andy Reid and general manager Brett Veach and a veteran nucleus galvanized by superstars Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Chris Jones, the truth is that there is a new context here for everybody.

No matter how much remains in place …

“New team,” linebacker Nick Bolton said. “New identity.”

With a new challenge — cut to Mission Impossible theme song — underscoring it all: the quest to become the first team to win three straight Super Bowls, a theoretically preposterous proposition in defiance of the gravity of the NFL and other obstacles.

No wonder when I asked Reid about what it’s like to deal with the unknowns entering the season, he smiled and said he’s “curious to see what we’ve got” for the opener. And, he correctly figures, every coach, fan, player and media member is equally so.

To say nothing of our fascination with the odyssey ahead.

Now, win or lose Thursday, we might want to remain more curious than judgmental, as “Ted Lasso” taught us.

Because we saw in 2023 that the Chiefs could falter in their opener, not to mention tumble to 9-6 with an appalling Christmas Day loss to the Raiders, and still win a Super Bowl.

And because a win over the team the Chiefs fended off in the AFC Championship Game won’t change the scale of the monumental broader challenge ahead.

In a league that cultivates parity through everything from scheduling, a one-and-done playoff format, the salary cap and the draft, small wonder these Chiefs are only the ninth team to win back-to-back Super Bowls since its inception in the 1966 season …

And perhaps less of a wonder that zero of their repeat predecessors even made it back to the Super Bowl the third time around.

Never mind that with four Super Bowl appearances and three championships in the last five seasons, the Chiefs have transformed a title blight of 50 years into what now seems a birthright.

Forget that with the Mahomes-led offense reduced to a shadow of itself, last season seemed like a prime time for the league to administer a comeuppance instead of the Chiefs pulling off the encore.

(Or, as Veach put it during the Super Bowl parade: “Finally we see what a Chiefs down year looks like” — insinuating the rest of the NFL had its chance and should have gotten them while they could.)

And put aside, even, that the Chiefs apparently shored up that vulnerability in the offseason. Even with free-agent signee Hollywood Brown to miss the opener with a clavicle injury, rookie Xavier Worthy and second-year man Rashee Rice — who didn’t find his stride until later in his first season — figure to give Mahomes much more to work with in the opener than he had last year. Not to mention that an injured Kelce missed that opening loss to the Lions.

That all seems like promising stuff. And it’s part of why I fully expect to see the Chiefs back in the Super Bowl again.

Just the same, the trick still remains that their “new identity” is up against would-be new identities around the NFL. The rest of the league becomes more resentful of the Chiefs by the year — and increasingly motivated to take them down.

So who and what will these Chiefs be, exactly?

Will the offense indeed return to more of what we’ve been accustomed to in the Mahomes era?

Can the defense be comparable to what it was a year ago, when it was second in the NFL in points and yardage allowed … and so good it enabled a seismic late-season shift in emphasis that paved the way to the title?

Are they going to again get better after things go awry?

Perhaps most of all, though, there is this dynamic to ponder:

For sure, this all feels like part of a continuum within a magical era — accented by Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and her romance with Kelce that has helped make the Chiefs an increasingly international brand.

But it’s actually a season all its own.

One in which these Chiefs are both sufficient to thrive and free to stumble on their own merits and flaws and the capricious twists of any given season.

As they entered the 2020 postseason seeking to win a second straight Super Bowl, I wrote a column about the psychology of the repeat — a pursuit for which that team was well-equipped in ample ways.

One of the people I spoke with then was Rich Keefe, the former director of sports psychology at Duke University and author of a book on the psychology of peak athletic performance called “On The Sweet Spot: Stalking The Effortless Present.”

He made a compelling point that proved prophetic in Super Bowl LV a few weeks later and has stuck with me:

“When the absolute winner is declared, they’re there on the basis of being really good plus chance events,” he said. “So that means the next year they could be just as good and not have those chance events work out on a couple things and then they fall back.

“So it’s not really that they weren’t as good; they just didn’t have the things going for them that they need to win.”

In that case, a Chiefs team that had won 12 straight games with its regulars (not counting a loss in the regular-season finale, in which Mahomes and most other key players were rested) was relegated to playing the Super Bowl with a decimated offensive line. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers won 31-9 that day.

Sure, that was an extreme example of “chance events” gone awry. And the Chiefs have navigated plenty of trap doors over these last few seasons — they became the first team to rally from double-digit deficits in all three postseason games en route to winning Super Bowl LIV and last season faced what was quite arguably the harshest postseason path in NFL history.

You could also say they’ve made plenty of their own luck, like when cornerback L’Jarius Sneed poked the ball loose from Baltimore’s Zay Flowers at the goal line in the AFC title game.

And, happily for the Chiefs and their fans, another observation of Keefe’s also remains as applicable today as it did nearly five years ago.

And it’s a factor that can’t be minimized, and hardly can be matched.

When it comes to the infinite impact of Mahomes, Keefe said, “You know his psychology has to be, ‘I can do this. Where is it? Where’s the lock that fits this key? Because I have a key.’”

That force of will and array of talent goes a long way toward leavening volatility around him. So does the guidance of the fourth-winningest coach in NFL history, who, in fact, leaves little to chance and often seems to control about all that can be controlled.

Moreover, whose starting offensive and defensive lineups would you rather have right now?

Still, that randomness, of health and quirky bounces and inexplicable mistakes, will have a say one way or another as the Chiefs take on the NFL’s grueling recipe for equalizing.

And the dial could spin to one particular point of identity that hovers as the most unsettling unknown of this team: experienced and reliable depth, particularly on defense and in both interior lines.

A year ago, one of the Chiefs’ most vital developments was the way astute offseason free-agent signings Drue Tranquill, Mike Edwards and Charles Omenihu came through down the stretch … as the Chiefs were stretched thin.

Whether they’ll enjoy that sort of benefit this time around, or be lucky enough not to have to face it much, can’t be known until the season unfurls.

If it all sounds overwhelming, well, that’s the nature of the unprecedented — and trying to create an identity for the ages.