Around Labor Day, the ritual seasonal forecasts of American football columnists burst onto the printed and electronic pages of our media. Even an intellectual like Robert Saletti, formerly in The Dutysacrificed to this custom.
I am always fascinated by the exhaustiveness of the exercise. These soothsayers who auscultate the future by digging through mountains of statistics rather than chicken guts make a point of delivering to us, year after year, when the leaves turn color, the complete picture of another fall of the National Football League (NFL) — each team’s profile, division rankings, individual honors, portrait of the playoffs and their results, Super Bowl winner, etc. Probabilistic high-flying.
It’s the only sport I know of where pundits dare to predict, even before the opening game, the exact number of wins each team will have. Of course, there are the countless online bettors, the ” poolers » always on the lookout, the followers of « fantasy football “… “All these people to make happy”, as Gilles Vigneault sang.
Not being the holder of any science of this kind nor of the time necessary to go and rummage through specialized sites, I was content, for my part, with a single prediction at the dawn of the new season: the Chiefs will continue to monopolize the sports “Twittosphere”, but more for their activities off the field than for their quest for a third championship in a row (the famous three-peat).
With football’s royal couple already grappling with a rumored breakup early in the season, it was a bit of a “butt-kicking” move on my part, I admit. During the Sept. 5 opener against the Ravens, Travis Kelce must have spent more time blowing hearts and kisses to a certain Arrowhead Stadium box than he did standing out, catching passes and running with the ball.
Too bad, for my prediction, that Tyreek Hill is no longer with the Chiefs, because what he accomplished last Sunday was almost too good to be true. As he headed to the stadium in Miami in his McLaren, he was chased by two police motorcycles. The cops will claim he was going 60 mph—in what zone, I don’t know. And the highway may have been congested. In any case, as far as dangerous driving goes, I think we’ve seen worse. But hey, we’re dealing with police officers from the United States. Just four months ago, their colleagues from Kentucky were handcuffing the world’s best golfer like a slob after he made the mistake of driving his SUV onto a median.
In Quebec, in the 1980s, when Guy Lafleur or Gilles Villeneuve would speed a little too much, the police officers who pulled them over, after apologizing, would let them go with a big smile, happy to have something to tell their wives and buddies. But Hill is in Florida. He is black and the type to wear expensive earrings. For forgetting to buckle his seatbelt and refusing to roll down the tinted window of his door — for fear of being machine-gunned by the cellphones of the fans converging on the stadium, he would later explain — here he is dragged out of his car, pinned to the ground and handcuffed behind his back like any other drug trafficker.
The Chiefs have an interesting history of court trouble. In 2018, their top running back, Kareem Hunt, who rushed for 1,300 yards and averaged 4.9 yards per carry the previous season, was kicked off the roster after he was caught on camera roughing up a woman at an Ohio hotel. Two months later, the Chiefs lost to the Patriots in the conference finals.
In 2021, a team coach, Britt Reid, none other than the son of the legendary reigning coach, after getting behind the wheel while intoxicated, was involved in an accident that sent a little girl to the hospital, before sending him to jail. Three days later, the Chiefs were taken by Tom Brady’s Bucs in the Super Bowl.
So you could say that Rashee Rice, who was brought in to fill Hill’s deep-end void, was following in a tradition when, last spring, while racing a Corvette in his Lamborghini at 120 mph on a congested Dallas freeway, he caused a six-vehicle crash.
The Chiefs were so expecting a lengthy suspension for their star wide receiver that they hired Marquise Brown, the Ravens’ former No. 1 receiver who was hanging around Arizona, to replace him. But with the league still waiting to rule on his case, Rice, against all odds, was in the Chiefs’ starting lineup on opening night in Kansas City. Better yet, even on foot, without his Lamborghini, he seemed to have wings, catching seven passes for 103 yards, as comfortable among opposing defensive backs as if he were playing Madden NFL sitting in his living room.
As for Tyreek Hill, nicknamed “Cheetah,” he looked as if he were still behind the wheel of his McLaren when, in Miami, just hours after having a cop’s knee between his shoulder blades, he caught a long pass from Tua Tagovailoa and put on one of those lightning bursts of acceleration that he has the secret to galloping under the noses of two defenders and scoring an 80-yard touchdown.
That said, forget the Dolphins. On opening night, renewed, still as formidable, the Chiefs machine got going. We wonder who will be able to stop them. Apart from the police, I mean.
Novelist, independent writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.