There’s a party in downtown Cincinnati on Sunday, admission $99, if that’s your kind of thing.
The occasion: It’s a watch party — er, the first-of-its-kind Jungle Watch Party — for the Bengals-Chiefs game that’s being played in Kansas City during the NFL’s late-afternoon window.
The Bengals certainly aren’t the first pro sports team to embrace the concept — get the fans together in a stadium that would otherwise be empty; make some money off it; and create a cool environment. Why not?
There’s a quirk, though, in the advertisement of the jungle excursion. It proclaims Sunday’s game as a rematch of another, played Jan. 30, 2022: the AFC Championship Game the Bengals won three seasons ago. Which, OK, it is, but it ignores that the Chiefs would beat them a year later in the postseason — and another year later in the regular season.
The vibes of the Bengals clinging to the past, a past that almost included a Super Bowl rather than the actual trophy, a past that has since been superseded by a reversal of results, have been received about as well as expected, particularly 600 miles away in Kansas City.
But how quickly we forget.
The Chiefs were once that team. Nah, they once wished they could be that team. Heck, they once wished they could just win a playoff game.
We even have a term for those days.
Pre-Mahomes.
Well, this week, the Bengals have offered a peek into what meaningful accomplishments look like for the remainder of the AFC.
In the post-Mahomes world, if you will.
That world is Ravens tight end Isaiah Likely missing a last-minute touchdown by the length of his big toe in the NFL opener and spending his post-game interviews warning the Chiefs that they better bring another level of intensity in the playoffs. That comment might have irked some, but the real takeaway should be that he knows his team will have to get through one very specific team in the postseason.
That world is Bengals wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase appearing physically ill while all but acknowledging the Chiefs have the sport’s best player, though refusing to actually say the name of Patrick Mahomes .
That world is the Bills once acknowledging that their offseason moves were designed not simply to win a Super Bowl but to beat the Chiefs. Because, well, isn’t that the same thing?
We have, for years, seen the way this Chiefs team has transformed the organization, even Kansas City itself. Talked about it. Analyzed it.
All relevant.
The tentacles of that transformation, though, are far-reaching. To Baltimore, Cincinnati and Buffalo. To Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Denver.
The Chiefs are not a run-of-the-mill defending champion. They are the how-are-we-going-to-prevent-them-from-doing-it-again champion. They are the team against which every other Super Bowl aspiration is measured. They are, alas, good enough that an opponent just might schedule a watch party in Week 2 and commemorate a game from 32 months earlier while doing it.
And here’s the thing: Those teams, those playoff contenders with a collective shoulder-shrug over the last half-decade on what to do about the team in KC? They’re right. This is a reminder, not a revelation: Every Super Bowl path since Mahomes has been that way.
But here’s the other point, and why everything we’re discussing right now is relevant in the middle of September: It’s not just the postseason.
During the Mahomes tenure (2018-present), no team has lost to the Chiefs in the regular season and then come back to beat them on the AFC half of the bracket in the playoffs.
Not one.
That is yet another way to illustrate the Chiefs’ dominance during this era, to be sure. But it’s more than that.
For six years, a team has had to know it is capable of beating the Chiefs in the playoffs, rather than believing it could be. That 2 1/2-year-old win the Bengals are celebrating this week? Well, they also had a win just a few weeks earlier in the regular season. They ought to celebrate that, really, because there’s likely a link between the two.
Just two teams, in fact, have bested Mahomes in the AFC playoffs: those 2021 Bengals, and the 2018 Patriots, who had also beaten the Chiefs three months earlier.
The causation link might be broken at some point, but it’s intact today, and that it’s lasted this long is telling.
It’s why, just two weeks into an NFL season, the Cincinnati watch party has identified something correctly: This is a big game.
For the opposition.
Look, it’s going to be hard to make arguments this season that the Chiefs are playing vital games in September when they proved just a year ago that the holidays weren’t too late for a turnaround.
But it’s never been exclusively about the impact on their own locker room. They’ve rebounded. Heck, in Mahomes’ first Super Bowl run, he opened with two wins against teams that beat them in the regular season.
But there has also been something meaningful — to date, without fault — about not giving life to a team in September or October that you might have to face again in January. It comes across in the post-game comments. Comes across in some offseason actions. But in the game, too.
“It’s definitely a rise in intensity, especially in these games against other contenders,” Mahomes said.
That’s the effect that the team in Kansas City — the one that spanned a quarter-century without a playoff victory — has on its most notable AFC opponents. That effect doesn’t wait until the playoffs.
It’s a near-stranglehold on the postseason results, sure.
But a complete stranglehold on the thoughts and actions that precede them.
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