Here Comes ‘Attitude’ Week for Kansas City

To their credit, the Chiefs endured a forgettable 6-11 season with an impeccably positive attitude. Loss after loss, from Patrick Mahomes to Travis Kelce to Nick Bolton and Chris Jones, the team’s locker-room leaders refused to cave.

“It's just integrity, man. It's integrity,” Kelce said in December. “I signed up to be a Kansas City Chief and I love doing what I do, and I know I've been dreaming of being in these moments and playing for an NFL team since I was a kid. And I think getting back to that will give you more motivation than you could ever need to play this game.

“And I think the integrity of being a man about your work and giving everybody your devoted attention and your sense of urgency to be at your best for them, I think that's just how you need to go about work, whether or not you're in the race.”

Racing to stay out of top 10

The Chiefs are in a different race now. They lost out on the race for an 11th consecutive playoff berth, and now they’re in a race to draft the best player with the ninth-overall pick. It’s the first time in the careers of Kelce and Mahomes that Kansas City has a top-10 selection entering March.

And the mission this week is to find someone who loves football just as much as Kelce and Mahomes so the Chiefs don’t have to be in this position again anytime soon.

“You got to come in with the right attitude, for sure,” head coach Andy Reid said Friday, asked to describe the type of players they want. “That's a big part of this thing. And there is a fit, literally; there's a certain expectation that we've got. We didn't reach that this past year.

“So, it's important that we take care of business from a coaching standpoint, from an organizational standpoint, whether it's personnel or front office, and make sure we keep the expectations high and aggressive. And then make sure we bring in the right people to be able to do that and handle it. And so, that's the whole fit you're talking about. That's what we're working through.”