KC Confidential

Can the Chiefs get back into the wild card race Sunday with a win at Denver?

On paper yes, but not likely.

Our boys are 3-5 with wins over two bad teams – Houston and Detroit – and one wounded team, the Steelers. Yes, they’ve won two in a row. However now they’re on the road to Denver where they never beat Peyton Manning and the Broncos. In fact they haven’t beaten the Broncos since Manning took over.

Yes, the Chiefs have been better as of late, but it’s hard to measure how much better given who they defeated. The Chiefs offense was all but nonexistant until they ran over Detroit in London last week. However Detroit has only one win this season.

Losing Jamaal Charles may have in a strange way have helped KC’s offense in that QB Alex Smith has been forced to use other weapons more often. That includes him running the ball which is one of the things he does best.

Denver suffered its first loss at Indy last week and are now 7-1 but they’ve all but locked up the division. The Oakland Raiders are much improved and seem headed for a wild card spot. The AFC is so upside down that teams like KC are still in this thing with only three wins.

If KC loses this week at Denver they pretty much have sealed their fate.

Only three teams have made the playoffs since 1995 with six losses.

I think the Chiefs will play it close but lose at Denver. The Broncos just have our number and Manning will be looking to bounce back from last weeks loss. Continue reading →

University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe steps down…

The chancellor of MU says he will end his days at the college this year as well over protests by students over race relations at the school.

And all of this was brought to a head by two student leaders. Payton Head, the president of MSA, complained about students in a car yelling the N word at him. Later someone using human waste to write a swastika on the walls of a bathroom. Nobody has been named or arrested for any of these incidents yet, but more were reported. The president of the school was aware of these and other incidents according to students but did little to prevent further issues.

The result was a hunger strike by student Jonathan Butler.

All of these acts were bandied about on Facebook and social media. Next the student football players got behind the students and Butler and the football team announced it would not play this coming weekend’s game if MU’s president didn’t step down – which he finally did.

There was also nationwide talk about the treatment of football players and athletes at predominately white college campuses. Regular African American students did not have nearly the care or attention that was given to the student athletes. Everything from tutors to living conditions.

And once it became national news everyone jumped in on the side of the students. Continue reading →

The University of Missouri bowed to the pressure and ran off its president…

Thus demonstrating the power of college sports in education. Then Concerned Students 1950 got a bonus; chancellor R. Bowen Loftin walked as well.

I can see the “racist” comments and hate mail coming now but let’s explore this.

What are the facts that lead to this?

In one incident, a drunken white college bro went on stage while black students were practicing skits and made a racial slur. Students stated, “They were made victims of blatant racism in a place that they should be made to feel safe.”

Next black student body President, Payton Head said he was walking down a street near campus when, “Some guys in the back of a pickup just started yelling the n-word at me.”

Finally, we have the charge of a poop swastika painted in a dorm. Seems more offensive to the Jewish kids than blacks, but they coopted the event into their narrative just the same. Continue reading →

The MIZZOU/BYU football game is on for Saturday at Arrowhead.  The mayor’s office estimates the stadium will be packed with 300,000 people.

                                    *******       *******       *******

Can we all get away from protesting red Starbucks cups and get back to protesting the $7 coffee?

                                     *******       *******       ******* Continue reading →

The NFL season is at the halfway point…

And New England quarterback Tom Brady has proven beyond a doubt that air in or air out of a football, he’s the best quarterback who ever lived. His team is 8 and 0 and they may go undefeated. Brady’s numbers are off the chart – 22 touchdowns, only 2 interceptions and 2709 yards passing. With a quarterback rating of 113.5 he’s the best in the NFL. Wow.

Now lets look back at deflate-gate…

Brady was charged by the league with cheating, having his guys inside the locker room take some air out of footballs. Most current and former NFL quarterbacks, including ultra conservative QBs say they too had air added or taken out. That included Joe Theismann. He likened it to baseball pitchers scuffing a baseball up to get the ball to drop or move before a pitch.

The amount taken in or out was so small it was almost undetectable.

Brady was accused of having this done in the first half of the AFC title game against the Colts. The ref’s watched more closely in the second half but Brady destroyed the Colts in that half as well. Tom went on to win the Super Bowl in yet another near record performance.  Continue reading →

Original art by Mark Valentine

Hooray! 

Kansas City is a world class sports town. The world looks at the pictures of us in awe. It was amazing to see that many people wearing a blue shirt that says “Kansas City.”

And we’re still an amazingly good music town. Our musicians are constantly been noticed by millions around the world. They are just harder to pick out because they don’t wear a blue shirt that reads Kansas City.

When Jason Pritchett made it to the finals of America’s Got Talent two seasons back, not very many people in Kansas City knew him. It was like we discovered his talent at the same moment the rest of the country became aware. Continue reading →

Kansas City crowd estimates used to be great sport…

Especially since nobody did any actual counting, so pretty much anybody and everybody could play – and play they did! The owners of the Country Club Plaza were the most prolific. Year after year they upped the attendance numbers for the vaunted Plaza Lighting Ceremony until it reached more than a quarter million people.

However the worst offenders were local television “newscasters” who with zero compunction embraced the unquestioned “estimates” then goosed the numbers to 300,000 or more. Like I said, anybody can and did play.

Enter a local businessman named Gary Evert who teamed with UMKC math and statistics professor Yong Zeng and lead a task force of students and volunteers to actually count the crowd, employing Jacobs Method.

Evert’s official tally: 32,000 and change.

In other words, about 10 cents on the dollar in comparison to media and Plaza estimates.

A front page bust went down in my column in the Kansas City Star, resulting in a confession by the Plaza that it had never counted the crowd and had no idea how many people were at its lighting ceremonies.

Which brings us to Tuesday’s Kansas City Royals Million Man March.

You know, the dazzling spectacle that prompted grown men – people like KC Mayor Sly James and Kansas City Star sports columnist Vahe Gregorian – to blather about completely ridiculous crowd numbers ranging from 500,000 to 800,000 people.

Straight faced, no less. Continue reading →