Bengals beat Chiefs, odds, coin-toss jinx for Super Bowl berth

By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Cigar smoke poured out of the visiting locker room Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium as the setting sun nicked the edge of the nosebleed seats, turning them golden.

Cincinnati Bengals players and coaches floated in and out of their borrowed doorway on clouds of tobacco. Stogies hung out of their mouths as chants of "WHO DEY!" and "We still going!" echoed off the concrete walls.

All of the Bengals wore T-shirts proclaiming themselves AFC champions. After a 27-24 overtime victory over Kansas City, Cincinnati is on its way to the Super Bowl for the first time since 1989. This team could actually take home the Lombardi Trophy for the first time in franchise history.

But those new, gray T-shirts would never have seen the light of day if Cincinnati hadn't orchestrated one of the greatest comebacks in NFL conference championship history Sunday. The only other team to recover after being down 18 points was the Indianapolis Colts, who vanquished the New England Patriots in 2006 to make it to the Super Bowl.

It doesn’t feel good to lose, of course. It probably feels even worse to blow a 21-3 lead and then give up the game in overtime, as the Chiefs did this weekend. Fans have recently condemned the NFL’s OT rules, seeing as the team that wins a coin toss can end the game with a touchdown before the other club has a chance to touch the ball (cover your ears, Bills fans). 

Entering Sunday, there had been 11 coin flips in the postseason since the OT playoff rules changed in 2010, and teams that won the toss were 10-1, with seven first-possession touchdown wins. In fact, the largest cheer to come from the stands Sunday happened when the Bengals called "heads" to give Kansas City the ball.

But none of that mattered. It was as though the Bengals lost the toss on purpose to prove they could beat not only the defending AFC champions — and prevent the Chiefs from going to their third straight Super Bowl — but also the rules themselves.

After strong safety Vonn Bell’s overtime interception, the Bengals sent out rookie kicker Evan McPherson. That's the same Evan McPherson who, a week ago, said, "Looks like we’re going to the AFC Championship" before knocking a football through the uprights to beat the Titans in Tennessee.

McPherson again sealed the deal for Cincinnati. He not only set the record for 50-yard field goals this season but also is now 12-for-12 in the postseason. The only kicker to surpass 12 was Colts kicker Adam Vinatieri with 14 in — you guessed it — 2006.

After the game, Patrick Mahomes looked as miserable as the Chiefs’ second-half performance was. About an hour after the game, he sat on a folding chair smack dab in the middle of a hallway near his locker room. He was holding his daughter, Sterling Skye, on his lap, and his fiancée, Brittany Matthews, sat next to him. He stared off into space with red-rimmed eyes. 

A few hundred feet away and 10 minutes later, I watched a man in a Chiefs pullover slap a lit cigar out of the hands of a Bengals guy. The Chiefs' guy stomped on it as he yelled, "No smoking in here!"

The Bengals weren’t fazed by winning in a hostile environment. Bengals fans traveled, and hundreds hung over the railings chanting "We want Joe!" long after quarterback Joe Burrow had disappeared off the field. 

But the team was tired. Offensive line coach Frank Pollack shook his head when asked how he felt.

"Exhausted!" he said with a laugh. "But exuberant. I don’t know. My head’s pounding."

So were the hearts of anyone who watched the AFC Championship. The only fitting way for the Bengals to reach the Super Bowl was to do so by a field goal in a game no one thought they could win. That's the way their season has gone. They aren’t supposed to be here, according to most NFL fans and media.

I mean, it makes sense. 

In 2019 — only two seasons ago, as difficult as that is to believe — the Bengals went 2-14. In 2020, Burrow suffered a gruesome knee injury after getting absolutely clobbered for the millionth time. He was still the most sacked quarterback this season. Vegas had the Chiefs favored by a touchdown.

But this team believed, and in two years under Zac Taylor, the Bengals have done what former coach Marvin Lewis’ "Bungles" failed to do in 16: win one playoff game, let alone three. This team has known — and has now proven — that this group of players is something special.

"I honestly think it’s just us being always who we are," wide receiver Tee Higgins said when asked where that confidence comes from. "It starts in the locker room. We joke around, laugh around. We’re just one big family, and it shows on the field."

Burrow has everything to do with the team’s dramatic turnaround. He’s now the first quarterback ever with a chance to win the Heisman, win a national championship, be drafted No. 1 overall and bring home a Super Bowl title. And he could do it for a city close to his heart.

"It’s something I’m really proud of, being from Ohio, being the quarterback of the Bengals, two-and-a-half hours from my hometown," Burrow said in his postgame interview with Jim Nantz. "It’s something I’ve always wanted — to play in the Super Bowl. And I couldn’t be with a better group of guys."

Burrow is a brilliant quarterback — he scrambles like he’s playing backyard tag, takes hits like he’s wrestling his siblings in the living room and throws the ball like gravity isn’t a law of nature. But he leads with a quiet confidence that everyone knew he had from the day he walked into the building. 

All it takes to know this guy is different is to watch him play. But if you also listen to him talk and watch him off the field, you understand why he makes everything look so easy.

This man has enough swag to be able to wear a black turtleneck and a giant, diamond-encrusted necklace at his postgame media availability without looking like a total tool. I told him he looked like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and he laughed. "I’ll take it," he said. 

He does not, for the record, have his Super Bowl outfits planned yet. But he’s working on it, and we can probably expect to see him wear this one again because he said it was a favorite.

Burrow doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’s not surprised to have made it to the Super Bowl, which is a big part of why he’s on his way in the first place. The whole team doesn’t take itself too seriously; they simply know they’re talented enough. 

Ja’Marr Chase, with whom Burrow won a national title with LSU in 2019, already owns the record for receiving yards in a single game as a rookie, and he’s closing in on the record for receiving yards in the postseason by a rookie.

"I just was talking about this to him earlier," Chase said when asked how it feels to be heading to another championship with Burrow. "He said, ‘You just went back-to-back championships.’ And I said, ‘Well, it was with you, too.’ 

"Everything’s an opportunity, and we keep having opportunities in front of us. I’m proud of this team, proud of this defense, proud of this organization. We’ve been doubted all year, and I’m happy for us."

Chase is right to mention the defense — that side of the ball stepped up massively to tie the game. Defensive end Sam Hubbard sacked Mahomes twice on the same drive to prevent the Chiefs from scoring a touchdown at the end of the regulation, and Bell then intercepted Mahomes 13 seconds into overtime. 

I’m old enough to remember when Mahomes got the Chiefs into field-goal range with only 13 seconds left on the clock last weekend against Buffalo.

Bengals fans are now where Chiefs fans were three years ago. Both teams ended a conference championship drought at Arrowhead and went on to the Super Bowl after years of suffering. 

But Chiefs fans didn’t buy it heading into the game. I found a K.C. fan named Angie Pitts walking outside Arrowhead before the game, wearing a Chiefs jersey and Zubaz pants and smoking a massive, red vape pen. She has been a Chiefs fan since she was 7 or 8 and watched them win a championship in 1970; she’s now 63.

"I remember watching Super Bowl IV. It was amazing," she said. "I have been here for so many seasons that we went 2-14 or 3-13, and all of a sudden we’ve been to the championship game four years in a row. I feel bad for Bengals fans because we’ve been there, and now they’re America’s darling. 

"Except they’re not. The Chiefs are America's darling, always will be."

Jeff Wolf, who was manning a grill with several brats on it (it was a very smoky weekend in Kansas City) didn’t think the Bengals were the Chiefs of four years ago before Sunday’s game.

"Maybe where we were five or six years ago," he said. "But there’s no chance this is their year."

Unfortunately for Chiefs fans, both Wolf and Pitts were wrong. Bengals fan Steven Jackson might have sounded overly optimistic before the game, but he turned out to be right.

"I think we mirror where the Chiefs fans were and where the Chiefs' organization was, rebuilding and getting back," he told me. "I love Patrick Mahomes. He’s a good quarterback. Joe Burrow is bringing game to game, and I do think he’s better. We’re here now, this whole season has been a turnaround, and I’m in love all over again."

This is the sweet spot for Cincinnati fans. When many years of suffering turn into potential gratification, it’s the purest moment in sports for a fan base. The Bengals faithful have stuck by their team for more than three decades — and if they’re younger than that, their entire lives — without seeing the team go to a championship.

Cincinnati now has a savior in Burrow, but that lasts only so long. If the Bengals go back to the AFC Championship or Super Bowl next year, they’re no longer the cute, small-market team that built something out of nothing. They will finally be expected.

Arrowhead is an otherworldly place. This stadium and the Kansas City Royals’ ballpark next door rise up out of the plains like two huge, alien spaceships that figured this mildly hilly stretch of concrete was a good place to land. If there’s one thing Kansas City has besides great barbecue, it’s space. The roads through the city are wide because they can be. The freight trains that roll through all day are reminders of just how far goods have to travel from one end of the country to the other.

Kansas City has physical expanses, but it also has more than enough room in its heart for the Chiefs. Players on this team are on every billboard. The entire city lights up red. The day before the AFC Championship, I watched a truck drive through the Power and Light district with Chiefs flags flying out of every window. This place lives and breathes its football team, which owns two Super Bowl wins separated by 50 years.

The Bengals are then, perhaps, the most worthy adversary to end the Chiefs’ season. Because if there’s any city starved for a hero, any place that has held a team close to its chest despite receiving no love in return, it’s Cincinnati.

But in two weeks, thanks to a group of players and coaches who believed when no one else did, the town that has never won a Super Bowl will finally have a chance.

Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and cohost of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.