The Kansas City Chiefs secured the number one seed following their Week 17 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers and therefore didn’t need to play their starters in their final game of the year. Playing their backups and third-stringers instead of their starters allowed the Denver Broncos to curbstomp K.C. and snag the final AFC playoff spot.
This is something that had Cincinnati Bengals fans fuming. Accusations were thrown out that the Chiefs were afraid of the Bengals making the playoffs even though we all know if the roles were reversed, Cincinnati would have done the exact same thing the Chiefs did. Why play any of your starters if you have the top seed locked up? Why risk any injuries to important players?
Travis Kelce discussed the accusations on his New Heights podcast. Jason Kelce brought up how people were saying the Chiefs were scared of Cincinnati and didn’t want the Bengals in the playoffs to which Travis responded (in typical Travis Kelce fashion), “I ain’t scared of f***ing nobody.”
Travis goes on to say, “I wanted them in the f***ing playoffs. I want to slay every dragon one by one like Mortal Kombat.” He’s not the only one who probably would have preferred to watch the Bengals square off against the Buffalo Bills instead of it being Broncos vs. Bills but hey, the Chiefs didn’t need to win their Week 18 game while the Bengals needed to do that and had to rely on other teams to do their dirty work for them.
Travis Kelce wanted the Bengals to make the postseason
Jason cracks a joke that Travis and the Chiefs didn’t want to see the Bengals in “Burrowhead” or in Cincinnati and Travis claps back that he’d play them in a WAL*MART parking lot. While that would be comical, it might be a little painful playing a football game on concrete.
He then goes on to praise the Bengals by calling them “a f***ing fun ass team to watch.” He continues, “That was one of the wackiest years of football I’ve ever seen from a team that I thought was 10 times better than what their record showed and I know that from just playing against them. We didn’t f***ing throw any game. Guys were out there competing their asses off trying to get a win. Unfortunately we couldn’t put drives together. We couldn’t stop Denver. It wasn’t a fun game to be a part of.”
Now it’s worth noting that Kelce didn’t suit up in the regular season finale because there was no need for him to. There wasn’t a need for the Chiefs to show any kind of offensive plays or try too hard because the team had accomplished its goal in Week 17. Bengals fans can be mad about that and spew any kind of garbage they want to but if they wanted to make the playoffs, maybe they shouldn’t have treated the first few games as preseason games.
