We Need To Pump Up Trent Green Pt. 8: One Last Time

2006 in the Trent Green story sees changes, injuries, and the end of one of the most underrated rivalries in NFL history.

The vaunted Kansas City Chiefs are falling apart all around us.

Years and years of poor draft choices, poor defensive game plan decisions, and excessive reliance on Trent and his four headed dragon have led us to this moment. It’s the 2006 offseason, and it’s all over.

There will still be a team walking onto the field in the 2006 season wearing red yellow and white, but it’s not the same team as it has been for all these years. Most pieces of a football team are ancillary. To use a less nice word, they’re replaceable, but there are changes that you just can’t make and maintain the same identity as a team.

Take the modern KC Chiefs for example. As long as they have Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, and Chris Jones, they will always be the Chiefs, regardless of what around that core may or may not change. The venerated Patriot dynasty could persist as long as it had Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, but as soon as one of those pieces went, they were no longer the Patriots.

The dynasty before them (the Dallas Cowboys) would always be the Cowboys as long as they had Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, and the Blue Wall in front of them all. The instant that Blue Wall came tumbling down, the 90s Cowboys were not the 90s Cowboys anymore, much like how we are no longer the 2000s KC Chiefs.

As long as this team had Trent Green, Dick Vermeil, and the four headed dragon, we would always remain ourselves, but now, as we stand in the 2006 offseason, Priest Holmes is gone, his career taken from him by injury at the age of 32, soon to be snubbed of a well-earned Hall of Fame induction. Willie Roaf also has finally decided that it’s time for him to hang up the cleats. He will not be snubbed of his well-earned Hall of Fame bust, being elected in 2012.

That leaves us without our Hall of Fame calibre RB, and without our actual Hall of Fame LT, but none of these losses hurt as badly as the loss of head coach Dick Vermeil.

Dick Vermeil is like the Palpatine to Trent Green’s Darth Vader, pulling all the strings to everything we’ve seen from behind the scenes. Darth Vader became the famous one out of that pair, because he was more visible, and it’s no different here. This is the Trent Green story, not the Dick Vermeil story, but would there have ever been a Trent Green story without Dick?

Trent was a 14 game starter for Norv Turner and the Washington Redskins in 1998. He was good there, but no better than good. Certainly not a player worth spending as much of my life as I’ve spent on chronicling his life and times. The Trent Green that we’ve grown to love was born in a meeting with Dick Vermeil during the 1999 offseason.

I talked about all the meetings with incoming offensive coordinator Mike Martz and the hometown impacts of going back to St Louis, but what I left out in my discussion of that 1999 offseason all the way back in part one is the impact Dick Vermeil himself had on bringing Trent to the Rams, because I wanted to talk about it here.

There was scheduled to be a dinner date in St Louis with Dick Vermeil attempting to court Trent, and wife Julie, to come to play for Trent’s hometown squad.

Dick was grossly late for this dinner, and think about that for a second.

Imagine being a highly coveted free agent QB, already with your mind a lot of the way made up that you’re returning to Washington, and having your potential new head coach show up late to a dinner date that you’ve brought your wife out for. It would’ve been very easy to choose to feel insulted. Perhaps, if Trent were a more vain man, he could’ve allowed himself to feel insulted, stood up, and left. He would’ve spent his prime as the QB for the Washington Redskins, and who knows what could’ve happened from there?

However, Trent knew Dick’s reputation for never being late to anything, so felt concerned (rather than angered) by Dick’s lateness. The Greens stay. They wait, and wait, and keep waiting, until Dick finally shows up.

The 62 year old head coach had gotten in a fairly serious car accident on the way to meet the Green family, and had to find an alternative ride to get to them. It took a while, but he ensured that he made it, and the dinner was a great success. Trent remembers this moment, watching the senior citizen pick shards of glass out of his forearm in front of him at dinner, instead of at a hospital, or at home with a phone call cancellation, or any of the million other places a senior citizen should’ve been in the wake of a car accident, as the moment that he knew he needed to play for Dick Vermeil¹.

A bond was immediately created between QB and head coach. It’s this bond that made Dick Vermeil (and several teammates) burst into tears when Trent’s knee exploded on that dang carpet in 1999. It’s this bond that ensured that Trent was given a Super Bowl ring, despite playing zero total snaps for the 1999 St Louis Rams, and after Dick retired from coaching and came out of retirement for the 2001 KC Chiefs, it's this bond that allowed him to part with a first round pick (which no other team was willing to do), because he knew that he would have success with Trent Green as his QB again.

It took time, but eventually, QB and coach together grew into this very complicated, speed-first, field stretching offence. Many teams (including the Rams themselves) tried to emulate Dick’s success with the 1999 Rams, but nobody could do it better than Dick and Trent did in the greener pastures of Kansas City.

According to Chiefs’ historian Bob Moore, by the time this offence reached its zenith in Trent Green’s Year of 2004, it would ‘feature between 250 and 300 plays each week, utilize 14 personnel groups, 35 shift combinations and 30 different motions to try and create an advantage before the ball was snapped. The offensive line would employ 50 different protection alignments.’

Things like this do not happen unless QB and head coach have intimate knowledge and trust in each other, and in the offence they are running. By the end, each had been at it for nearing a decade. In 2004 and 2005, the Chiefs were coming off the bus shifting and motioning, all in an effort to confound and distract opposing defences, and it worked spectacularly well, so well that every team in the NFL stole this idea, and are all using it now.

This is what having a long-entrenched QB-head coach combination can do for a team. The basics (and even the difficulties) were so well ingrained that there was no more need to practice the Chiefs’ own quality. Our offence was so far ahead of the curve for so many years that we changed our focus to trying to mess with the defence, and the game of football has never been the same as a result.

Dick Vermeil was not afraid. In a pre-2004 rule change world where many NFL coaches were paralysed in fear of getting fired, and spent most of their time pacing up and down the sideline just hoping for nothing to go wrong, Dick was not afraid to air the ball out. He was not afraid to put his trust in an INT-prone QB like Trent Green.

He was not afraid to win the football game.

The Chiefs won many football games with Dick Vermeil as their coach, 44 in total, but how many would they have won without him? To answer this, I did a thought experiment where a more conservative coach shifts more of the play calls toward Priest, to the point the KC Chiefs are 50/50 between pass and rush, instead of the approximately 55/45 they were in real life.

With this one change, the KC Chiefs win approximately 30 games between 2001 and 2005. An average of just six per season. Dick averaged well over eight, and that’s what having a coach that isn’t afraid can do for you, especially when enduring a defence the likes of which the Chiefs have been dealing with for years. Did the Chiefs draft any good defensive players under his watch? Not really, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t an offensive savant.

Dick announced his retirement from coaching prior to the end of the 2005 season, which may explain part of the reason why we finished it blowing out two of the better teams in the AFC by a combined score of 57-10, but cannot take away that this team is undeniably losing a lot of our identity.

The 2000s Chiefs were an offensive juggernaut. The 2000s Chiefs were fearless. We were the ones who took on Peyton Manning when nobody else could. We were the ones who kept some really good Broncos teams from ever being viewed as serious contenders. We did a lot of important things in this conference, but we’re not going to do any more, and the reason for a lot of that is Dick Vermeil’s replacement.

Herman Edwards.

Herm and Dick have a close personal relationship, which I suspect is a big part of the reason why this hire is made in January of 2006, but as coaches, Dick Vermeil and Herman Edwards cannot be more different. Where in many ways Dick was new school, fearless, and a forward looking window into what the NFL was about to become, Herman Edwards is a relic from an NFL era that by 2006 is rapidly dying.

He is the epitome of the stereotypical conservative, perpetually scared NFL head coach, trembling on the sideline hoping nothing goes wrong. Those who have been around this publication long enough know my opinion of him based on my interpretation of his impact on the career of Chad Pennington, which in my view was mostly negative.

Wherever Herm Edwards goes, a no-risk west coast offensive co-ordinator follows. One would think Dick Vermeil’s long-time right-hand man (and co-architect of this KC offensive juggernaut) Al Saunders would have no reason to be let go from that job, but he wants no part of the Herm Edwards experience, jumping to go be the OC in Washington at the very first available opportunity, which leaves former OL coach Mike Solari to run the offence, which is bad news for our man.

Trent Green is not built to operate a no-risk west coast offence. There are elite QBs who can hit the back foot and let the ball go with timing (modern allegory: Tua Tagovailoa), and there are elite QBs who like to drop back and sit in the pocket for a while before finding their target (modern allegory: Patrick Mahomes). Trent Green certainly fits into the latter category, and we saw in 2001 that trying to jam him into a west coast offence does not go well.

Much like Mahomes, Trent Green is mistake prone. He makes decisions that will leave you sitting with your mouth agape. On the flip side, he can make throws that nobody else can make, but in order for this skill to shine through, you must allow it as an offensive play caller. To have success with Trent Green as your QB, you must allow him to stretch the field, which will make up for his mistakes, which us Trent Green supporters have always admitted are quite frequent.

This entails not forcing him to throw with timing, and not confining him to throwing the ball ten yards and shorter all the time. If Trent is forced into this playstyle, he will begin pressing, and when Trent Green starts pressing, TrINT stands a serious chance of rearing his ugly head again. I know this because we’ve seen it all before. Trent has tried to play in west coast style systems, and performed very far below his extremely lofty standards when put into such a position.

Quite frankly, I don’t know why the decision was made in the 2006 offseason to pivot towards west coast offensive coaches. Was there nobody in the world that could’ve been brought in to be head coach that could’ve convinced Al Saunders to stay? Why couldn’t Al Saunders have been named head coach?

The 2006 season was always doomed to be a terrible disappointment, with the four headed dragon having been whittled down to just Tony Gonzalez and Will Shields, number one WR Eddie Kennison now being one year older at 33 years of age, and Herman Edwards sitting here, poised to do what he’s best at, which (in my opinion) is putting QBs in positions to fail.

Despite all of this, the KC Chiefs still have a preseason over/under set at 9.5 wins, which indicates that even with all the personnel losses, both on the field and in the coach’s office, expectations are still high.

I don’t think this is fair to our man Trent, who is now 36 years old, coming off a 2005 season that was a slight step back from his career norms anyway. The Chiefs did finish that season averaging 29.1 points per game in the final seven game stretch following the embarrassment against Buffalo, the most of any team in football, and for the whole of the 2005 season, the Chiefs finished with a top five offence again, which means Trent is definitively not washed, but he’s starting to slow down just a tad from where he was.

In the first game of the 2006 Chiefs’ season, a rematch against a Cincinnati Bengal team we’d beaten 37-3 last year, this shows, as we’re already losing pretty badly. Of all the things that have changed about this team, the slow starts are not one of them. Once again, for what feels like the millionth season in a row, Trent and his Chiefs are laying an egg in the first game of the season on offence.

Although the result is similar, this looks nothing like other season openers. All it takes to see that is a cursory analysis of Trent’s passing chart for this game. It shows that of 18 total drop backs, six of them were passes of ten air yards or longer. One of them was a pass attempt 20 air yards or longer. Running a west coast system, short and safe is optimal, but this is not a Trent Green pass chart. Not by any means.

I commend him for trying his best to bend his playstyle to fit the system he’s been forced into playing in, but this is not working well.

It’s only one game, and the first game at that, where the Chiefs always struggle, but it is not encouraging to come out looking so bad under a new coach and new system. It’s hard to say whether or not this downward trend would’ve continued, or if Trent would’ve kept right on going like he’d been going, with some adjustments after the typical slow start, because the truth is, we’re never going to get the chance to see. I told you last time that age is not what’s going steal Trent Green’s prime from him.

We’re about to watch Trent’s prime end, right before our eyes.

This game was already a lost cause for the Chiefs, which makes it even more heartbreaking when in the third quarter, they take the biggest loss of all. Trent had to use his legs a bunch in this game, on account of not much else being available on a lot of his drop backs, such is the state of the new offence. It’s a harrowing sign of things to come when a few plays before the play, Trent picks up a hard fought nine rushing yards on a third and eight play, and gets up looking thoroughly disgusted.

This is not the reaction you’d expect for a player who’d picked up a razor thin first down on a crucial third quarter drive, but the implication is clear. Trent is quite mobile for his era, but at heart he’s a pocket passer. He is tired of this rushing attempt stuff. He would much rather throw the ball, but just a few plays later, Trent is again forced out of the pocket, with his only option being to tuck the ball and run.

Trent Green is no Lamar Jackson. This wily old veteran knows everything there is to know about an NFL passing game, but he still only has 192 career rushing attempts, with a lot of those being to commit suicide in the victory formation. He is not accustomed to this ‘running with the football’ stuff. He does pick up the first down again, but he times his slide wrong.

It’s too late. This leaves Trent entirely defenceless against a defender who (under the 2006 rules) is free to hit him. It’s just Trent Green’s luck that the Bengal coming up to hit him couldn’t have been a DB. It couldn’t have even been a linebacker. Instead, the man looking to put a serious hurting on the man who remains a top four QB in the conference is 286 pound DE Robert Geathers.

That’s the Trent Green story.

People in the past and even the present have called this hit dirty, but at this point I consider myself one of the foremost authorities in the world on Trent Green, and I must stand up for Geathers a bit here.

Was he attempting to injure Trent on this play? Absolutely, but you know what? The hit was legal. The way I see it, attempting to injure people with legal hits is the entire purpose of playing this game as a defensive player. This hit is really edgy as to whether it’s within the rules or not, but it’s almost exactly simultaneous as to when Robert launches compared to when Trent starts sliding. Robert’s shoulder does not hit Trent’s head. It hits his chest, and the whiplash from this extreme blow in the middle of the chest causes the back of Trent’s head to slam into the ground with immense force. This hit to the back of the head from the ground (and not Robert Geathers from the front) is what knocks Trent unconscious.

Watch the clip if you dare, but I warn you it’s pretty ugly. This exact incident is why defenders are not even allowed to hit sliding QBs in the chest anymore. Trent lays motionless on the field for 11 of the most uncomfortable minutes the NFL has ever seen as of 2006. CBS commentator Gus Johnson makes the obligatory spiel about how medical staff are bringing the stretcher on the field as a precaution, but in this case it is not a precaution. Trent Green cannot stand. Trent Green cannot move. He’s entirely unconscious.

There is no thumbs up as he’s being stretchered off the field. No waving to the crowd. It is not even safe to remove his helmet. The forehead strap on the backboard is fastened around Trent’s helmet, with the facemask removed manually. That helmet will not leave Trent’s head until well after he arrives in local hospital.

The fear is that there is a serious neck issue, given the whiplash for the ages that we’ve just seen, and since Trent is still unconscious due to the almighty concussion he’s just suffered, he cannot tell medical staff whether he has any feeling in his fingers or toes. As far as the stadium medical people are concerned, they are working to save Trent Green’s life, and ensure that he will not spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Thankfully, it’s not that serious, as about 30 minutes afterwards, when Trent finally wakes, he can inform doctors that he does have feeling in his extremities, and further testing indicates there are no serious neck problems. Thank goodness for that, as it means that rather than needing to work just to walk again, there’s a serious possibility that our man can be back on the football field in just a few weeks.

These are the kind of thoughts that go on in the warped mind of a football player.

Trent will never remember getting hit by Robert Geathers. He will never remember being stretchered off the field, and he will never remember how scary those few minutes were. The first thing he remembers is waking up in the back of an ambulance, still strapped to that same backboard, looking up at Julie.

He panics, and flips out on his poor wife, who is likely relieved just to see him open his eyes again, berating her with questions about what’s happened, about why he’s in the situation he’s in, and with demands to get him out of this situation. I was not there for this interaction, and I’ve only heard Trent tell his side of it, but concussed people are not known for their emotional stability. I’m glad that Julie Green was the one at Trent’s side when he woke up, and not me.

At last, he makes it to the hospital. Everything is explained, and everything is diagnosed. Trent has a severe concussion. Not the type you can rehab by avoiding strenuous activity for a few days. The type that throws your whole equilibrium off. Your legs cannot balance. Your eyes cannot focus. That kind of thing. It’s almost impossible to explain unless you’ve been through it, and every concussion is different.

Therefore, you have not been through it. I have not been through it. Nobody has been through this exact type of concussion except Trent Green, so what can I possibly be qualified to tell you about his rehab process?

What I can tell you is that rehab from a major concussion is awful. It is constant. It is life-consuming. All the while your emotions are playing with you for reasons you cannot understand, and nobody can truly tell you when your rehab is finished except you. There are concrete tests that can be done that show that concussion rehab is not done, but no such thing exists as a concrete test to tell a concussed person that their rehab is done.

This is the worst thing in the world, because you want your concussion rehab to be done today. Yesterday even, but you can’t cut the line. You can’t make yourself right in any other way except following the process until you’re right again. For some this takes days. Others months.

It takes Trent mere weeks to clear NFL concussion protocol, which in his mind makes him ready to play, but the Chiefs are not convinced. They keep sending him to different doctors for second opinions, third opinions, fourth opinions, fifth opinions, all the while backup QB Damon Huard is ranking tenth in the NFL in EPA/Play, and playing what is my pick for the best game in KC Chiefs history.

This drawn out process to get back on the field causes some real bad blood between our man and the franchise he’s been at the head of for so long. Almost instantly after leaving the Chiefs, Trent will realise that his team was just looking out for him throughout this whole process, making absolutely sure that he would not go back on the field before he’s ready, but again, concussed people are not known for their emotional stability, and living through this process in 2006, Trent is seriously angry about it, as he wants his rehab to be over, and the Chiefs are not allowing it to end.

Like I said, this beef will dissipate almost the second that our man gets out of the Chiefs’ facility, but for the remainder of his KC career, the bad blood over this concussion rehab issue will never truly go away. Trent Green has never been one for drama like this, but with the right type of concussion, it can reveal the worst in even the best of people.

However, even after all this drama over just how the rehab should be handled, Trent was always going to return to the football field eventually. Some want Damon Huard to stay, as he does rank 10th in the NFL in EPA/Play currently, but doing that with a -3.3 CPOE indicates that the cliff is coming, and even if it didn’t indicate that, this is Trent Green we’re talking about. Ranking in the top ten for half a season is great for Damon Huard, but it’s not exactly ranking in the top five for four consecutive years like Trent has.

This is no QB controversy at all. This is Trent’s team, but as he finally gets back onto the field for a week 11 game at home against the Raiders, we must confront the reality that the Trent Green who is coming back is not the same as the Trent Green who left.

I don’t want to say it. I put this series on the backburner for two months to avoid saying it, but I must say it.

Trent’s prime is over.

Concussions affect every person differently. I wrote an article last year detailing how a particularly bad concussion stole the prime from Cody Kessler, a Browns QB who could’ve been a great talent. It did this via completely stealing away his once elite throwing accuracy. Trent’s throwing accuracy mostly stays, but it’s the feet that fail him.

Our man has always been great in the pocket. Not top tier Peyton Manning level sack avoidance, but only one level below that. Trent has never had a worse than league average season at avoiding sacks as a Chief, and only in his wretched 2001 season did he fail to be great at avoiding them. All of that is gone now. That is what this concussion has taken away.

From this point until the end of the 2006 season, Trent Green will be the NFL’s third worst QB at sack avoidance, better only than Andrew Walter and Aaron Brooks. Combined with his always-present penchant for throwing interceptions, these two things combine to make Trent a good pick for the NFL’s very most mistake-prone player in 2006. When combined with the NFL’s foremost scaredy cat in Herm Edwards, this is a recipe for disaster as an offence.

Let me show you what I mean.

On the first drive of this Oakland game, Trent is allowed to throw just a single pass. He completes it to Dante Hall, and that’s all the action he gets, as Larry Johnson and the rush offence walk down the field and score a touchdown without any of his help.

That’s great, but it’s never going to happen twice. On the Chiefs’ second touch, Trent isn’t allowed to touch the ball until two rush attempts have placed the team into a third down situation. Trent cannot dig us out of the hole, and we have to punt. On the third touch, there is a first down pass, but then an unproductive Larry Johnson rush puts us in a third down position and we have to punt again. Due to how long this is all taking due to all the rush plays, both of our own and for the Raiders against our perpetually awful rush defence, that is actually the end of the first half already. Just three possessions, and two of them have been squandered without even truly trying.

Throughout this process we’ve fallen behind 13-7, as our defence cannot even stop the 2006 Oakland Raiders, the team that will finish last and select JaMarcus Russell in the 2007 NFL Draft. We get the ball to start the second half, and at last things begin to look better, as Trent finally unleashes a deep ball to Samie Parker for a much needed 18 yard gain.

This is the first time we’ve been in Oakland territory since the first drive of the game, but then our man’s newfound poor feet show up to bite us. A seven yard sack on a first and ten play puts us behind the sticks on second and 17. We cannot recover, and must punt the ball again. The defence bends and bends and bends, but ultimately gives up no points, so we once again get the ball down just six points. Are we able to do anything with it this time?

Actually, yes. Albeit not much. A 17 yard run from Larry Johnson and a deep ball to Eddie Kennison get us into field goal range, even in the absence of any other positivity, and we narrow the deficit to three. Our defence finally gets a three and out, which brings our offence back onto the field, and it’s run, run, run, run, run.

This is why I said the 2000s Chiefs were dead earlier. Dick Vermeil was always staunch that if a game (aside from blowouts) featured more run play calls than passes, something had gone terribly wrong. This is terribly wrong. It’s evident that Herm feels the need to hide Trent, because even now in the fourth quarter, our man is allowed to attempt just three passes on a long, drawn out drive that ends in a missed attempt on what would’ve been a game tying FG.

This is not the Chiefs’ harmony that I’ve been raving about for so long. Judging by their actions, this is a team that feels the QB position is a serious weakness, and for the life of me, I cannot understand why that is, because when we get the ball back at the four minute mark still behind 13-10, and needing a touchdown to win, we go right back to Chiefs’ harmony (six runs, five passes), and use it to walk right down the field and score.

Was that so hard Herm?

In the end, we defeat the luckless Oakland Raiders 17-13, but this game was not a positive sign for the future of the Kansas City Chiefs. We got the win, but to do it we needed to rely on our defence for not one, not two, not three, but four crucial stops in a row, something that will not happen again.

Not in Kansas City it won’t.

There were only two drives today in which Trent was allowed to attempt more than two passes. The final two. One resulted in a missed field goal. The other a touchdown. The Chiefs’ other five offensive possessions combined for exactly the same production. One field goal. One touchdown.

This is what Herm Edwards coached teams will do folks. In 2002, Herm had the best QB in the NFL in 2002 Pennington, and still felt the need to hide him.

Why?

Passing is inherently risky, and Herm Edwards is a coward. He will turn every QB he has, no matter the quality, into a game manager and nothing more. Trent has been a top five QB in every one of the last four seasons, the only QB in the NFL who can say that, and his usage pattern today was that of a rookie.

The old Chiefs are dead everybody. Killed by cowardice and fear. Fear of what having a top five QB in the NFL will do for your team. Of course, we know he is not that top five QB anymore, but Herm Edwards didn’t. Trent was just coming back. He had no idea what his star QB was going to look like. He didn’t care. He wasn’t even willing to give it a try.

Nevertheless, we did defeat Oakland, leaving us at 6-4 coming out of week 11. The Chargers are 8-2, and not going to lose again, meaning they’re gone. We’re not going to win the AFC West. This means that our only path to the playoff is through the wild card, and once again, for one final time, we find a familiar obstacle standing in our way.

It’s about time Jake Plummer got a photo in this series.

Trent Green’s most common career opponent is Jake Plummer, and it’s not even close. By the time it all wraps up for him, Trent will have started 113 career games. 11 will have come with Jake on the opposing sideline. Ten percent of all Trent’s career starts come opposing Jake Plummer.

Nobody knows it yet, but these men who have been division rivals since 1998 (with a small break from 1999-2002, during which the two still played each other twice) will both be ousted from their current situations prior to the start of the 2007 season. From that point forward, they will no longer be division rivals, and will never see each other on the football field again.

I know a lot of the attention in this series has been devoted to heaping praise onto the Trent Green vs Peyton Manning rivalry, but I sincerely hope I’ve also done adequate justice to the part Jake Plummer has played in all this. I have named him and his teams the permanent obstacles because that is what they’ve been. Stubborn roadblocks that simply would never get out of the way and allow Trent to rule the AFC West. I’ve said a lot of things about a lot of other QBs in this series, but I will take a pause to make this statement definitive.

Jake Plummer, and his Denver Broncos, are the reason Trent Green ends his career with so few playoff appearances.

If not for those damn Broncos, Trent could have won the AFC West a lot more than once, and the wild card races our Chiefs kept getting mired into would’ve been a lot less competitive. If you believe that Trent is underrated primarily because he made the playoffs so few times, Jake Plummer is the reason for that. Not Peyton Manning. Not Tom Brady. Not anybody other than Jake Plummer.

Every player needs a career defining rivalry. Tom Brady had Peyton Manning. Peyton Manning had Tom Brady. Brett Favre had Steve Young, and Steve Young had Brett Favre. Patrick Mahomes has Josh Allen, just like Josh Allen has Patrick Mahomes. Our man is no different.

Trent Green’s career is defined by repetitively running into the permanent obstacle that always was Jake Plummer, and Jake’s career is defined by repetitively beating our poor KC defences into the dirt, over and over and over again, but both Trent and Jake are rapidly running out of NFL starts. Neither is going to be at this for much longer, so what you as an audience have to know is that when Jake’s 7-3 Broncos come into town to meet Trent’s 6-4 Kansas City Chiefs, only one of these teams is going to make the playoffs.

In both 2004 and 2005, the Broncos have won this race. They have gone to the playoffs. We have not. It’s on us to ensure that this rivalry doesn’t end with Jake beating us to the final playoff spot again.

It starts out well, and I begin thinking that maybe the offensive coaches have learned their lesson, as we come out with KC harmony (four rushes, four passes) to start this game off strong with a FG that came perilously close to being a TD, but as the Broncos fail to score in response, I am brought back to my senses by a KC drive that consists of two unproductive rushes and Trent trying to bail the team out of a third and long, and failing to do it. We punt the ball back to Denver.

Just like last week, our shaky defence is holding on for dear life. They bend and they bend, but they do get the ball back for our offence again, with no points allowed, and our next offensive touch starts out extremely well, with a 19 yard run from Larry Johnson taking us into Denver territory, and the next play even sees Trent take a deep shot towards Eddie Kennison.

This deep ball is forced, and it’s into double coverage, but that’s what will happen when you mandate that a natural gunslinger play in a west coast scheme. It’s encouraging to me that Trent is still trying. This is a totally explicable play.

What’s entirely inexplicable is a handoff on second and ten on the opponent’s side of midfield. It goes nowhere. It puts Trent in a bad third and long position. We have to punt again, and I cannot explain the play calling. I praised the Chiefs for doing exactly this (not being afraid to run the ball, even in a second and 15 situation) in one of the Peyton Manning shootouts several years ago, but this used to be a Chiefs team that could do whatever it wanted on offence. It isn’t anymore. We can’t do things like this anymore. We can’t afford the consequences should they fail like we used to, but our genius play callers elect to do it anyway, and as a result we punt.

This ends the first quarter with a 3-0 lead, and Jake and the Broncos show no likelihood of scoring, giving us the ball back again with the same 3-0 score, and it’s a bit of a blast from the past. Trent is allowed to attempt only three passes. Two of them at least look like the Trent Green of old. He drops back in the pocket, and sits. He feels no need to throw with timing as soon as he hits the back foot. This is a step in the right direction, and allows him to complete passes of ten yards (all air) to Tony Gonzalez, and 14 yards (all air) to Samie Parker. On the third, he hits the back foot and gets the ball out immediately, which is an extremely poor decision and almost turns the ball over.

This is the dichotomy, between the Trent Green of old, and what we’re seeing now, all played out in one drive against the Denver Broncos. Larry Johnson does most of the rest of the work in getting this touchdown drive completed, and it’s 10-0 Kansas City. Due to Larry grinding and grinding at the Denver defence, that one drive took most of the second quarter, meaning we don’t touch the ball again as Jake works down the field for a FG, and we go into the locker room with a 10-3 lead.

This is a great spot. Jake Plummer is not in his prime anymore either, and despite their 7-3 record, the Denver Bronco offence is a long way short of exceptional. NFLFastR’s estimated Win Probability model sees us as having a 77 percent chance to win from this position, as we get the ball coming out of half too. This leads us into the third quarter, where for just one quarter, this game looks like the epic rivalry of old.

We come out firing, even throwing a pass on the first touch of the new drive, and on the inevitable third down, Trent again looks like Trent. He drops back, and sits. The pass falls incomplete, but draws a penalty, which allows us to try third down again, and our man finds Tony Gonzalez for a first down.

This drive is like the Herm Edwards version of the Trent Green trump card. It features seven passes to just three runs, and gets its way down the field for a FG and a ten point lead. It’s maddening that we don’t see this more for the 2006 Chiefs. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t have to be in these terribly close games all the time.

It’s nowhere near over yet, as Jake also walks his team straight down the field in response to this FG, but he puts his team in the end zone for a 13-10 deficit. This back and forth, even if we only get it for a little while, is making me nostalgic for the old days, when these two used to rule the second tier of the NFL together.

Those days are over though, as on our next touch Trent is allowed to throw the ball only twice, as even though both throws are complete and go for 20 combined yards, it’s apparently against the law to have the majority of plays be throws on two drives in a row, so Larry Johnson almost monopolises the ball as we score another FG to pump the lead back up to 16-10.

From here, the nostalgia dies down. The back and forth stops, and both teams quit scoring again as the clock winds all the way to eight minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, where the Broncos have once again punted the ball back to us. Two Larry Johnson rush plays have left us in a third and six, and Cris Collinsworth is advocating that with how well our defence has played, this may be the time to shut it down and either call draw or screen.

This is how far public perception of Trent Green has fallen.

Where did it all go so wrong? Just one year ago this man was universally recognized as at least one of the best ten QBs in the game. Now Cris Collinsworth is saying that the Chiefs ‘certainly aren’t going to throw the ball down the field.’ When did Trent go from the man to not even being trusted to throw a simple third down pass?

This is Trent Green. Even now, definitively past his prime, he doesn’t throw simple third down passes. Instead, he throws the ball over everybody’s head to Samie Parker for a 26 yard completion, showing the world that it’s still in there somewhere. He perhaps can’t let the elite QB out on every play like he could before the bad concussion, but it’s still in there, and if you think you can cheat up to stop Larry Johnson, he is still perfectly comfortable throwing the ball over your head, third down or not.

He’s not allowed to touch the ball again, but this one throw has made the difference. The Chiefs finish this drive with a FG to go up 19-10, and the Broncos can’t make up a two possession deficit with so little time left. 19-10 will remain the final score. Our playoff hopes remain alive, and the permanent obstacles have at last been vanquished.

Neither the Denver Broncos nor Jake Plummer will be back to haunt us any more.

Trent Green vs Jake Plummer did not go down in the annals of NFL history as one of its most epic rivalries, but this is the Trent Green story. I’m going to give it the credit it deserves here.

It is not a typical QB rivalry. It featured periods of both definitively getting the edge over the other. Trent at different times defeated Jake’s teams by scores of 49-0, and 45-17. On the other hand, Jake defeated Trent’s teams by humiliating scores of 45-27, and 30-10 at differing points as well. In both men repeatedly getting the measure over the other, neither were ever actually able to win this rivalry, because look at the scores in the seven games between the two that weren’t blowouts:

29-27, 24-16, 24-23, 34-24, 31-27, this 19-10 game, and (in my opinion) the ultimate representation of Trent Green’s NFL career, his 45-42 defeat at the hands of Jake Plummer on November 22, 1998. It was that moment, almost exactly eight years ago, where I gave Jake his nickname, the permanent obstacle, and we were never ever able to shake him off.

He never got the better of Trent, evidenced by the 6-5 record in the games the two played against each other, as close to .500 as it possibly can be, but by just being there, and constantly finding an ability to get in the way of our ambitions, he backdoored his way into being the rival that this Trent Green series needed.

This truly was an epic divisional rivalry of the 2000s AFC, buried under the weight of Peyton Manning vs Steve McNair in its time and several others in the years after it ended. In these 11 games, Trent averaged 28.5 points per game. Jake averaged 25.8. Individually, Trent played better over these 11 games, but Jake does have the 6-5 record over him.

To attempt to determine a winner in this rivalry is to attempt to split the atom with your bare hand. It’s not possible, but one cannot deny how important this rivalry was, both to its combatants, and to the NFL as a whole, because these two really did a number on each other in the court of public opinion.

As far as the most underrated QBs of the 2000s AFC, Trent Green is a clear and obvious number one, but have you ever thought about who is in second place? Chad Pennington was the best QB in the NFL in 2002, but never ranked in the top ten in EPA/Play again. Was he better than Jake Plummer? David Garrard ranked in the top five in EPA/Play once. That’s the same number of times Jake Plummer did it. Who else in underrated?

You see where I’m going here.

It is my belief, and I intend to maintain this belief, that these two running into each other so many times is the key reason that both of them will never get the recognition for the fantastic NFL QBs they were. There are levels to this, and Trent is above Jake by a long way career wise, but when the two matched up on the football field, there was nothing to separate them. They were equals. They were peers. No man ever did win out over the other.

This could be phrased a different way, that they both dragged each other down into the depths, and to a degree that’s true. If not for Trent Green, Jake Plummer would’ve had a much easier time challenging Peyton Manning and Tom Brady at the top of the conference, and if not for Jake Plummer, Trent Green could’ve had a much easier time challenging the top dogs, and this is the key reason that both ended their careers as terribly underrated players, but you know what?

They’re not underrated here, and I sincerely hope I’ve done an adequate job celebrating this like the epic intra-divisional rivalry that it was, because both Jake and Trent deserve that.

Now that one fantastic rivalry is concluded, it’s time to get onto concluding some other ones. We’re now 7-4, and still have a playoff spot to chase. You know how it normally goes in playoff races for these KC Chiefs, but you never know. I have a good feeling about this one.

Click back next time to see if Trent Green can ever get that elusive second career playoff start.

Thanks so much for reading.

1. Click this link for a podcast featuring Trent telling this story in better detail than I ever could.