Sound the alarm! America’s (new) Team, the Kansas City Chiefs, are on a two-game losing streak dating back to February’s Super Bowl. And now, questions are being asked.
Has the once great Patrick Mahomes lost his fastball? Is Travis Kelce distracted by the most famous woman in the world? Has the rest of the NFL simply figured them out?
The sports media loves a good narrative, and by golly do the Chiefs offer plenty. But Fox Sports NFL analyst Rob Gronkowski doesn’t necessarily subscribe to any of the narratives above. Nope, Gronk is concerned with the body language he’s seeing out of the Chiefs and their ability to respond when “punched in the face.” The former New England Patriots tight end explained himself on Wednesday’s episode of Up & Adams with Kay Adams.
“What I was surprised about was when things aren’t going their way, as you can see, when they start struggling a little bit, they start yelling at each other. The blame game starts going on, you can see it on the sidelines. And that’s not a good situation. You want to come together when you’re down, when things aren’t going your way, you want to come together to figure out why everything is not going the way it needs to go. So seeing them starting to point fingers is not a good sign,” the Fox NFL Sunday analyst said.
“The Philadelphia Eagles opened the floodgates last year in the Super Bowl versus the Kansas City Chiefs, like, ‘Hey, we’re not afraid of this super-team Kansas City Chiefs that are very very well known,” Gronk continued. “I feel like a lot of teams last year had that fear. ‘Oh, I can’t swing on the Chiefs, we can’t give ’em our best shot because they’re so well known and everyone is, you know, talking about them.’ So, the Philadelphia Eagles punched them in the face. The Chiefs didn’t know how to react to that because no one else was doing that. Well, going into this year now, the Los Angeles Chargers punched them in the face. The Chiefs were like, ‘Woah, they’re coming at us. How do we react?’ Well they didn’t know how to react because no one was doing that before. So the Philadelphia Eagles opened that floodgate of, ‘Hey, you punch these guys in the face, you take it to ’em, you come out swinging, they’re going to fold and they’re not going to be the team that you’ve been seeing all last year.’”
Someone’s gotta say it. This isn’t exactly high-level analysis from our boy Gronk. The Chiefs played in more than their fair share of close games last season, some of which they came from behind to win. But there’s probably an element of truth to what Gronk is saying. The body language and communication hasn’t looked stellar. There’s been finger-pointing on the sidelines. Maybe there’s a twinge of doubt creeping into the once invincible psyche of the Kansas City Chiefs.
And if there’s anyone that should be the ace of vibes-based analysis, it should be Gronk.
