We Need to Pump Up Trent Green Pt. 7: Old Man Trent

2005 sees Trent carry the aging Chiefs to one last championship chance, only for his pervasive bad luck to rip it all away one final time.

Welcome back to the Trent Green saga everybody! My sincerest apologies for how long this has taken. Part six came out on September 19, better than two months ago, and I apologise for that. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I believe my Trent Green serial to be sacrosanct. I will not allow anything of even slightly below standard quality to slip through the cracks, which has caused me to rewrite this article several times, but there is another reason, one more related to football.

I’m afraid.

Afraid that it’s all going to be over soon.

The Chiefs have been in the upper echelons of the NFL for a long time. You don’t get an infinite amount of chances at the NFL level, and as we enter the 2005 season, this KC Chiefs core is getting old. It starts with our man Trent Green, who has just turned 35 on the ninth of July, and it continues with the three headed dragon.

All-Pro LT Willie Roaf is 35 years old. All-Pro RG Will Shields is 34 years old. Tony Gonzalez is only 29, but that’s still just one year away from being on the wrong side of 30 himself, and it’s not just the top of the line players either. Long time C Casey Wiegmann (whose name I regret I haven’t found a chance to mention in this serial) is 32. Number one receiver Eddie Kennison is 32. Number two WR Johnnie Morton is already gone, a necessary cap casualty, as he was the oldest of the bunch anyway.

Even with Johnnie being replaced admirably with the 24 year old Samie Parker, this still leaves us with an average age of our offensive starters above 30. 30.5 to be exact, and if we take into account RB years, 32 year old Priest Holmes (who is back to start 2005) should perhaps pull this average upwards more than he does.

We are running out of chances to rule the NFL world. We’ve gone over in prior installments how poor this Chiefs regime is at scouting and drafting college players. Gonzalez and Shields are holdovers from a prior regime, and Trent, Priest, Willie Roaf, Casey Wiegmann, Eddie Kennison, and even good defensive players like Patrick Surtain (the original), were all acquired as pros, via either free agency or trade.

This astute ability to scout and bring in pro players was what allowed the Chiefs to build themselves into a juggernaut of an offence so quickly. We’ve gone over that process in detail. However, the lack of any ability to supplement it with young players from the draft (except Larry Johnson) is causing it to age quicker than perhaps it should.

The 2005 Draft again fails to change this, as in all seven rounds the Chiefs are able to find one starter. Although (just like Jared Allen last year) it’s a damn good starter in LB Derrick Johnson, drafting three starting players over the previous three drafts is just not a sustainable plan for an NFL team, and we’re beginning to age out.

Trent Green is no exception. He’s not the pretty young man he used to be, with his face beginning to show signs of years gone by, and his hair now sporting a salt and pepper complexion, but he is coming off his best performance in the NFL so far in his age 34 season, generating 0.283 EPA/Play in a very healthy 642 plays in 2004.

With Priest Holmes now back from injury, plus Larry Johnson having proved himself with some extended playing time last season, Trent will not get the chance to put up those gaudy numbers ever again, but he doesn’t care about that. Trent Green cares about scoring as an offence, and about winning as a team. This is a more rare trait than you’d think amongst the NFL’s QB fraternity. It’s a rare breed to find one like Trent who lacks any care for the amount of recognition he does or does not get.

He may not be looking for recognition himself, but people around him care on his behalf, and this is a good time to talk about how beloved our man has become in his locker room.

Trent has always been an odd personality for the QB position. Never really a vocal leader, he comes across as emotionally aloof at times. He is a playful guy, often joking, but can also seem somewhat distrustful. He’s gaining confidence, having started all 64 games since being traded to KC, but will forever remain fearful of the time bomb that is his left knee.

To his teammates (and himself), the scar on his left knee everyday is becoming a less and less something to be feared, and more and more a symbol of mental and physical toughness.

Football players love QBs who exhibit mental and physical toughness, because they are often the only players on the football field that do not have to. Think of people like Jay Cutler (born without any physical or mental toughness) when I say that. Jay Cutler got over $100M to play a game that he never loved, was not willing to put his all into, and was never even that good at, and here we are looking at Trent Green, a man who should not even be an athlete given the state of his left knee, who could’ve easily been mentally broken by being supplanted as the man in his own hometown of St Louis, and having to watch another man win the Super Bowl that he could’ve won. All of this after his half decade long journey to even get into the NFL.

We’ve watched a man with every hurdle in the world put in front of him rise to rank third on my QB tier list in leading the NFL’s top offence in both 2002 and 2003, and its second best in 2004. He deserves every ounce of recognition he gets, but at the age of 35, Trent is beginning to get recognition of the type he doesn’t want.

Trent Green is just six months younger than Brett Favre. We don’t think about it that way, because Brett started throwing NFL passes in 1991. Trent didn’t throw his first until 1997, but we can’t rectify age by putting it on a per season scale like we can for football statistics. 35 years old is 35 years old.

Upon the Packers drafting Aaron Rodgers, Brett immediately began a whisper campaign that retirement may be coming soon. We all know this was a power play with that organisation, and he didn’t truly mean it, but nobody knew this in 2005, and largely because of these rumours, media heads turn in the 2005 offseason to the other elder statesman among the ranks of the elite QBs, Trent Green.

Although Trent strongly and succinctly denies that he’s ever even considered retirement, strongly enough that it quashes all retirement rumours for the foreseeable future, it can’t have been nice to have had that R word thrown at him. That’s not a word that any player wants to hear, as it does work to remind both Trent and us observers that the end is coming. We may not be on the home stretch yet. We may be. It’s impossible to tell.

What I do know is that Trent has developed a habit over his career of getting off to slow starts to begin the season. He played well below his standards in the first four weeks of both the 2003 and 2004 seasons. Now that our man is in the 35+ age group, it’s not up for debate that one of these slow starts will eventually not fade. Poor performances in the first weeks of the season will immediately set the rumour mill ablaze, and Trent does not want that.

This season sees the Chiefs open the year against the New York Jets, a team that got within one missed kick of the AFC Championship game last season. This is also another callback to when Trent Green and Chad Pennington faced each other as the NFL’s two best QBs in 2002. 2005 is a long way from that, but nevertheless, this is not an easy first opponent for a habitual slow starter.

Trent bucks the trend in a big way, generating 0.24 EPA/Play in a 27-7 blowout victory over the poor old Jets, and he does the same thing in week two against the hopeless Oakland Raiders. These two wins get the Chiefs fandom riding high, but week three brings them completely to their knees.

Remember last year when we went into Denver, and came out with a devastating blowout victory, one that seriously hindered the Broncos’ playoff chances? Well now we have to go into Denver again, and the permanent obstacles have a different tone in mind this time.

They shut us down the way we’ve seldom been shut down before. Very rarely in the Trent Green-Priest Holmes era have we been held to negative EPA/Play as both a pass and rush offence in the same game (normally teams have to choose between stopping one or the other), but that’s exactly what happens today. The rush offence struggles. The pass offence struggles. The defence (as is typical) can provide no resistance. The score is 17-0 by the end of the first quarter, and 30-3 by the time the Broncos call off their dogs in the fourth quarter.

In the end, we take a brutal divisional loss 30-10, in a game that we were only three point underdogs in. The betting public thought we had a serious chance to win it. The Denver Broncos did not think the same, and their viewpoint proved correct. It’s a humiliating send-off back to the lower playoff positions, a needlessly brutal punishment for thinking the Chiefs were still the top of the line contenders that we used to be, and week four makes none of this any better.

If you haven’t figured it out already, the NFL has set us up with an extremely difficult schedule again this season, just like they did last season. It’s not quite as difficult as last year at the top end, but in terms of consistent difficulty, it’s just as bad. The 2005 season sees us playing ten (Denver 2x, San Diego 2x, New England, New York Giants, Dallas, Washington, Miami, Cincinnati) of our games against teams with winning records, in addition to playing the 2005 New York Jets before the Chad Pennington injury, and the 2005 Philadelphia Eagles before the Donovan McNabb injury.

Notice that of these games against good teams, we’ve only gotten Denver out of the way in the first three. That means it’s going to be rough sledding from here. In technical terms, this gauntlet does not start yet, as in week four we’re taking on a Philadelphia Eagles team that’s going to finish the season just 6-10, but like I said, they still have Donovan McNabb and Terrell Owens at this point, meaning we get to take on the defending NFC champions at full strength.

Lucky us.

This is by no means an easy game. It’s a very difficult one, but considering we’re playing at home, it is one we’re favoured to win. To begin, we get a blast from the past. A showing of harmony from our KC offence that was once typical. Priest accounts for 34 yards. Trent accounts for 32, as we open the scoring with a TD and a 7-0 lead. Receiving no response, we score another FG largely on the back of Priest to take a 10-0 lead, and after a fumble on the ensuing kickoff, we score another quick TD to take a 17-0 lead at the close of the first quarter.

From a 17-0 deficit at this point last week against the permanent obstacles to a 17-0 lead at the end of the first quarter this week against the defending NFC champions. Will the real KC Chiefs please stand up?

I really ought to learn to be careful what I wish for.

We know who the real Chiefs are. They’re slow starters. This is only week four of the season, and in this game, that slow starting team stands up and reveals itself.

A pick six thrown by Trent narrows the score to 17-6 after a botched extra point kick, and even though a Dante Hall touchdown return pumps the lead back up to 24-6, this is a bad sign of things to come. Larry Johnson fumbles the ball in our attempt at the two minute drill, which allows the Eagles to work one instead, and we go into half up just 24-13.

Still good, but not as good as a 17-0 first quarter lead, and something tells me this isn’t going to go too well in the second half, because for the Chiefs it never does. The opponents figure out they need to key on the pass instead of the run, and Priest Holmes puts up gaudy numbers as the KC offence begins to (relatively) struggle. This has been every Chiefs game since 2001. We know the script by now. Today is no different.

Our defence has nothing for the Eagles, and to begin the second half, our offence has nothing for them either. Achieving just two first downs in the third quarter means we go into the fourth facing a 24-24 score, but even that doesn’t stay for long, as Philadelphia begins the fourth with a FG to take a 27-24 lead, and with a Dante Hall fumble on the kickoff, they take a 34-24 lead, and now we are in an extremely bad position.

This is beginning to remind me of the 2003 game where the Chiefs played the Packers. Do you remember that one? The one where Trent singlehandedly completed a 17 point fourth quarter comeback and defeated one of the NFC’s best teams? Behind ten points to the Philadelphia Eagles with eight minutes to go, that’s exactly the performance we’re going to need to get out of this one with a win.

But we just don’t get it.

We can’t even get out of the starting block, as Trent throws another interception and it’s over. Just like that. No heroic comeback. Not even a position created where I can paint him as a sympathetic loser. Trent generated -0.18 EPA/Play in this game, and lost.

This is one of the only times in the whole of the career of Trent Green where I can begin to understand the haters’ point.

The Chiefs had built up a 17 point lead, and just needed to sit on it, but the one flaw that I’ve always admitted he’s had as a player is that Trent Green has never been one to leave well enough alone. Gunslingers like Trent cannot turn it off. He does not know how to play a risk free style. Trent plays the way he plays. You get into these habits when you’re forced to carry one of the worst defences in the NFL around on your back for four consecutive years.

This reckless abandon benefits the Chiefs far more often than it hinders us, as this is not a team that’s built to sit on leads, but on the rare occasion the we are able to build a big advantage, it would perhaps be a benefit if Trent could tone it down just a little bit.

We saw this last year too, and it’s truly been present throughout the whole story. Trent has a penchant for throwing interceptions. When you throw a lot of interceptions, it follows that you will throw very poorly timed interceptions sometimes, and this game against Philadelphia is perhaps the ultimate example. If Trent could’ve just toned it down a little bit, the Chiefs probably could’ve won, but he never has been able to do so, and didn’t start now, so here we stand at 2-2, staring down a stretch of three games in a row against winning teams.

With the 2005 AFC being one of the more stacked conferences of the new millennium, it’s imperative that we not come out of this stretch with a losing record. This AFC is going to finish the season with eight (!) teams sporting a point differential of at least positive 40. We share a division with two of them in the Broncos and the Chargers, which really doesn’t help our playoff chances, and means that we can’t afford to drop silly losses, like the silly loss we’ve just taken to Philadelphia.

If we were in the NFC, I’d still quite like our chances, but since we’re in the AFC, this is getting pretty close to life and death already.

That’s the Trent Green story.

Week six (after an early week five bye) sees us welcome Washington into Arrowhead for a game between two teams both desperately in need of this win to stay in playoff positions in their respective conferences. Strangely, this game will see Eddie Kennison finish without a single target, which got me wondering whether he even played, but upon replay review he certainly was out there.

Electing to work without his top receiver turns out to be a wise decision, as Trent generates 0.35 EPA/Play against a pretty stout (eighth ranked) Washington pass defence, in an unexceptional but workmanlike 28-21 win.

I implore you not to take the word unexceptional as an insult. Going against a Joe Gibbs pass defence, you are going to look unexceptional. That is not up for debate. Joe won several Super Bowls on the back of his elite pass defences. It’s all about taking what that defence will give you, and Trent did it better than anybody else, as he is one of only two QBs in the 2005 season (with the other being Chris Simms, somehow) to have a performance as good as 0.35 EPA/Play against Washington.

This is a team that played Donovan McNabb, Drew Bledsoe twice, Eli Manning twice, Matt Hasselbeck in the midst of his epic 2005, the permanent obstacle Jake Plummer, and Drew Brees. None of these people could do as well as Trent Green did against them. That’s a pretty impressive group to be at the head of.

Week seven is very similar. In a game very strangely played on a Friday night in Miami in an effort to avoid Hurricane Wilma, Trent again goes off to the tune of 289 passing yards and 0.38 EPA/Play against the Nick Saban coached Miami Dolphins to move to 4-2, and ensure we won’t exit this nightmare of a three game stretch with a losing record.

Thank goodness for that, because now we have to take a break from football to talk about family.

Trent Green never really wanted to play football. He saw it as too dangerous. Too violent, and was much more interested in the AAU basketball scene, in which he was excelling at the young age of 12 years old. However, when seventh grade rolled around, there was one man who set Trent on the path to where we see him today.

Jim Green was a high school football star in Iowa. The type of star which would have attracted significant recruiting attention today, even in a state which is not exactly a hotbed for football talent. However, his continued success in football was ruined by being shipped off to Vietnam at the close of his high school career. By the time Jim eventually made it back from Vietnam, it was too late to have a football career, but he made something good of himself anyway, becoming quite a successful salesman, and having three children with his wife Judy: Troy, Trisha, and Trent.

Circumstances may have never allowed Jim to fully explore his football potential, but nothing could prevent him from transplanting his passion for the game into his son Trent, whom he handed a football at the age of 12, and who has not put it down since, now aged 35. That’s 23 years of football, and Jim Green has been there for every snap.

Jim was there for his son when he came perilously close to being undrafted in 1993. He was there when he fell out of the NFL altogether in 1994. He was there when Trent even fell out of the CFL, and he was there when Trent came back South. Jim was present for Trent’s first career start in 1998. He was there when his son nearly lost his career on that dang carpet in 1999. He has been present for every home start since Trent got traded to Kansas City in 2001. He was not planned to be in attendance for week eight on the road in San Diego, but what nobody could’ve accounted for was Jim Green’s death on October 27, 2005.

Often times for males, there is a tendency to look back into their memory and think of one’s father as if he is the greatest man that ever lived. Sometimes this perception is correct, and sometimes it isn’t, but in this case, Trent’s father had a tremendously positive impact on his future career prospects, and life in general, counselling him through one of the hardest journeys to the NFL any star QB has ever had to go through, but now he’s gone. Dead by a sudden heart attack, aged 58.

It would be one thing if Jim’s death had been precipitated by years of health issues, like the deaths of many fathers are. It does nothing to dampen the loss, but it does give some time to brace for the blow. The world did not give Trent (or any of the Green children) the same courtesy. One day he was there. The next he was not.

I cannot imagine how tough of a blow this must have been to everybody in Jim’s orbit, as everything I read about the man genuinely paints him to be a fantastic human being. It had to have been incredibly hard for Trent to pick up a football again knowing the man who ignited his passion for the game in the first place is no longer here to watch him play. I know I would’ve never wanted to go back, and this does show in his performance.

The week eight game in San Diego is one of the more boring football games we’ve come across in the Trent Green story. The Chargers pull a quick 21-3 lead on us, thanks to too many plays being wasted on a rush offence working at a 23% success rate in this game, and spend the whole game riding with an estimated Win Probability fluctuating around 95 percent.

Trent (once the run is entirely dispensed with) is able to briefly get us within one score in the fourth, but this doesn’t stick for long, as we allow another touchdown to put the game away, and we eventually lose 28-20. Trent individually has shaken off his bad start, generating 0.265 EPA/Play over a very difficult three game stretch, but it’s just difficult to care about things like that given the circumstances.

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However, this San Diego game does force us to say one final goodbye, as Priest Holmes goes down one more time, and will not play in 2006. You will not see his name again for the remainder of the Trent Green story.

It’s never fun to see the end of a career, especially as in the years since we’ve had to watch RBs Priest was clearly better than (i.e. Edgerrin James) be elected to the Hall of Fame, but truly I hope I’ve done him fair justice as a side character in this greater story. Back to the season.

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The first home game in Kansas City without the presence of Jim Green is our second divisional matchup against the Oakland Raiders. It is not easy for Trent to walk into the stadium for this game. Eventually, he does find the courage to walk up to his father’s vacant seat (in section 121 of Arrowhead stadium), and place a handwritten note on it. Nobody will occupy that seat for the remainder of the season.

In typical Chiefs fashion, it takes everything we’ve got to defeat even the woeful Oakland Raiders, but with a clutch fourth quarter comeback drive in the two minute drill, culminating in a touchdown on the very last play of the game, we do manage to defeat Oakland to move to 5-3. The aftermath of this win gives us this fantastic picture of the QB and coach who’ve been through so much together sharing this emotional moment with one another.

This is one of the best games in the history of the KC Chiefs by the way. Watch it, but I’m not going to go any deeper into it than this, because it’s just hard to watch Trent play this way.

He played okay in San Diego, but quite poorly against Oakland (0.05 EPA/Play against a defence even worse than ours is well below Trent’s standard). These performances are excusable, given his truncated and half-focused practice weeks planned around the time needing to be spent arranging the burial of his father, but I don’t know if even that can excuse the week ten horror show in Buffalo.

What was supposed to be one of our few light games on the schedule instead sees every second half possession except two (one punt, one missed field goal) end in a turnover, as the Kansas City Chiefs are held to single digit points in a game (exempting games where starters were resting) for the first time since November 11, 2001. This Buffalo game takes place on November 13, 2005.

That means the KC Chiefs had not been held to single digit points in a game (with the exception of one game against Oakland in 2002 where nobody really played) for four years and two days. Keep in mind as I say that, the current (2024) KC Chiefs’ streak is barely even one year long. They were held to single digit points just last year.

Nobody can match the offensive consistency of the 2000s KC Chiefs. Not even their 2010s or 2020s selves, but that streak is now over with a humiliating 14-3 loss at the hands of a Buffalo defence that isn’t even good. The Bills will end the season ranked 30th in EPA/Play allowed, and they killed us. It’s the second worst game of Trent Green’s NFL career by EPA/Play, the very worst that took place in his prime years, and it hurts the 2005 KC Chiefs badly.

With the 9-0 Colts, 7-2 Broncos, and 5-4 Patriots (in the extremely weak AFC East) all being runaway division winners, plus the 7-2 Steelers and 7-2 Bengals fighting to the death over the AFC North, this leaves our 5-4 Chiefs in the position of being reliant on a wild card spot to make the playoffs already.

As of right now, the 7-2 Bengals have a one game lead on everybody for the first of the two AFC wild card positions. Thankfully, we are just one game out of the second one, sitting behind the 6-3 Jacksonville Jaguars, but we also need to pass the 5-4 San Diego Chargers, to whom we’ve just taken a spanking, the level of which is not conveyed by the 28-20 score, even though Trent individually played acceptably well.

This next stretch of games will prove critical, as with no game against Jacksonville on the schedule, it’s going to take a very good stretch to pass them. We do have a game remaining against San Diego remaining, so we control our own destiny there, but the fact remains that we are running out of mulligans. We’ve only taken four losses, but against the 2005 AFC that’s about all the losses you can take.

Over the final seven games of the season, we must make up one game on Jacksonville. However, because this is the Trent Green story, we are not trying to make up ground on a level playing field. Not even close. Of our final seven games, six of them are against teams who currently have winning records (Patriots, Broncos, Cowboys, Giants, Chargers, Bengals). Compare this to Jacksonville’s schedule, where the Jags have to play one game of their last seven against a winning team, with two soft touches against Tennessee, a home game against the awful San Francisco 49ers, and road games against the horrendous teams in Arizona and Cleveland showcasing the ease of their path.

This is not a fair fight. We’re trying to win this boxing match against Jacksonville with one hand tied behind our back, and we have to not just win it but win it convincingly, as we must make up a full game on the Jaguars. If our offence continues lagging the way it has been, we will not be able to do it. We will finish 8-8 or 9-7 and miss the playoffs again. Nobody wants that. It’s happened to this team too often. Thankfully, the humiliation in Buffalo seems to have woken the sleeping giants.

There is no mercy for the poor Houston Texans in week 11. We go into their stadium as seven point road favourites, and we walk out as 28 point road victors. In years gone by, the New England Patriots in week 12 would’ve been a difficult challenge, but in 2005 the Patriots are the 2023 Dolphins of their time. They lose every important game they play. This one is no exception. Trent generates 0.51 EPA/Play and brushes the two time defending Super Bowl champions to the side easily, at one point pulling a 26-3 lead before the Chiefs give up on offence and allow New England to close the gap to a 26-16 final score.

This finally gives Trent a head to head win over Tom Brady, which is a fun thing to have. He’d already outplayed Tom several times, but had not actually beaten him until now, so if you consider that an important box to check (I don’t, but some do), there it is.

These two games were a fun blast back to the old days of Trent Green torturing people on the regular, but all of it is just window dressing when compared to week 13, the most important game of our 2005 season. With both the Jaguars and Chargers also having won each of their last two contests, we have gained no ground in the playoff race at all. That means we still have two teams to pass, with five games left to get it done, all against winning teams.

The math is simple. We cannot afford another loss, and this is a great time to get our chance at avenging our most humiliating defeat.

I nicknamed Jake Plummer ‘the permanent obstacle’ all the way back in 1998. It’s now seven years later, and here he is. Still blocking our path. He (and his 9-2 Broncos) humiliated us 30-10 in week three, catching us before we could get out of our slow start for the second season in a row, but remember what happened in the late season matchup between these two teams last year. We humiliated them in recompense, with Trent having one of the best games of his NFL career.

The 2005 version of the Broncos are too good for that. They are 9-2 after all, but they are not too good for us. We’ve beat them before, and we’ll beat them today, but we have to do it our way. Our defence allows a quick one play touchdown to begin the game, and we begin with a 7-0 deficit.

Where have I heard those words before, but no matter. We respond with a pretty quick touchdown drive of our own, capped with a 41 yard touchdown pass from Trent to Dante Hall to narrow the score to 7-7. A Jake Plummer end zone interception gets our offence the initiative, but a pass from Trent through the hands of Tony Gonzalez and into the waiting hands of Champ Bailey gifts it right back.

When the Broncos do nothing with their possession, a 54 yard pass from Trent to Eddie Kennison puts us in prime position for Larry Johnson to score the touchdown that puts us up 14-7. Before long it’s 14-14 at 3:30 of the second quarter. Eating up 3:30 in scoring a touchdown to end the half is something we used to be great at, but without Priest Holmes, that’s not so much true anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. We do score, but we score so fast that it leaves about a minute and a half for Jake Plummer to score also, so we go into half with the score tied 21-21.

Once again, it’s another blast from the past. Back in 2002 and 2003, and even last year, we used to play games like this all the time. The character of the team has changed a bit since then, but we’re still equipped for these shootouts. The Win Probability model puts our chances at 48% going into the second half. Don’t believe it. This is what we do. It’s not what the Broncos do.

Both teams trade long FG drives to see a 24-24 score close to the end of the third quarter, but another interception allows Denver to take a 27-24 lead at the dawn of the fourth. Remember what this game means to us. The 7-4 record doesn’t mean anything. We cannot lose this. We’ve lost plenty of these fourth quarter shootout type of games in our history, but this cannot be one of them.

With an assist from John Lynch trying to kill Eddie Kennison (and taking a needless 15 yard penalty in the process), we do score a TD to move the score to 31-27 at the ten minute mark of the fourth quarter, and from this point I see something I never thought I‘d see in a KC Chiefs game.

The defence clutches up.

In an anticlimactic ending to an epic football game, the Broncos get two chances to score on us in the final ten minutes of the fourth. Neither sees as much as a first down, and in the middle of these two touches, our offence does their part, managing to run seven of the ten minutes off the clock, and we win. We drop the Broncos to 9-3, boosting ourselves to 8-4, by the final score of 31-27.

This gets Chiefs fans thinking in the moment that a division win may still be possible, but we’re out of Denver games on the schedule, and them still being ahead of us means we need one more Denver loss worth of help which never comes, as this game turns out to be the only Bronco loss between Halloween and the AFC Championship game. That makes this win feel even more impressive, but it’s still wild card or bust for us.

Believe it or not, it’s still bust, as even with an 8-4 record, we’re still on the outside looking into the playoff picture right now, currently tied for the final spot with the San Diego Chargers, to whom we obviously lose the tiebreak due to the week eight head to head loss. Our motto is still the same. We still cannot afford any losses, and the schedule does not get any easier from here, as we have to go play the 7-5 Dallas Cowboys on the road in week 14.

Playing on the road in Dallas is not a fun thing to do. When the Dallas Cowboys are good, it’s very often something that spells doom for a football team. However, we begin with the initiative, with Trent rolling away from heavy pressure to complete a clutch third down pass to Samie Parker on route to a Larry Johnson touchdown and a 7-0 lead, and that’s the score at the close of the first quarter.

We must wait until the eight minute mark of the second quarter for any further change on the scoreboard, when Dallas kicks a FG to move the score to 7-3, but our response is immediate and fierce. One of our easier touchdown drives in a long time to make the score 14-3. A 71 yard pass from Drew Bledsoe to narrow the score to 14-10 is not desirable, but we’re prepared, driving inside the Dallas ten yard line again, when the whole season turns on its head.

Trent gets strip sacked, loses the ball, and is able to do nothing but watch as it is returned 59 yards. The inevitable touchdown soon follows, and after dominating the first half of football, we go into the locker room facing a 17-14 deficit.

Isn’t it just our luck that one of only two sacks Trent takes all day just happens to end so disastrously?

We must regain the lead, and do so at the beginning of the third quarter, riding Larry Johnson all the way down the field for a 21-17 lead, a lead that sticks all the way until the beginning of the fourth, where (oddly enough) Terry Glenn scores a rushing TD to take the lead back for Dallas, 24-21.

After both teams waste some time trading punts, there are eight minutes left in the fourth quarter. The KC Chiefs are behind 24-21, and it all comes down to this. We either score in these last five minutes, win, and take advantage of San Diego’s loss today to go on and make the playoffs, or we don’t score, lose, and once again fall behind two teams in the AFC playoff race, as even the freefalling Pittsburgh Steelers would jump back ahead of us.

This is where the men are separated from the boys, and once again, Trent Green proves he is a pressure player. It only takes three passes, but the big one is finding a wide open Eddie Kennison behind the defence for a 47 yard touchdown reception and a 28-24 Chiefs lead. NFLFastR’s WP model now gives us a healthy 72 percent chance to take a stranglehold on the AFC’s final playoff spot.

However, that still leaves the 28 percent of the time we don’t.

Because this is the Trent Green story, a game ending fourth down Dallas incompletion is wiped out by a defensive holding penalty, and the Cowboys eat up almost all the time remaining, scoring a TD to take a 31-28 lead, and giving us the ball back with just 16 seconds remaining on the clock.

Wait a minute.

KC Chiefs, 16 seconds remaining, down by a field goal, with their playoff hopes on the line.

You’re not telling me…

That’s exactly what I’m telling you.

Did you think Patrick Mahomes was the first one to ever convert this hopeless of a situation? He’s not even the first KC Chief to convert this hopeless of a situation. Trent Green is the original magic man.

I bet you’ve never heard about when Trent Green did exactly the same thing Patrick did in the 2021 playoffs 16 years beforehand, except slightly more difficult, because while Patrick had timeouts to use after both plays (and therefore had the use of the whole field on both), Trent only had one, meaning one of his two plays had to go to the sideline and the Cowboys knew it.

Patrick’s work in a slightly easier version of this same situation will be spoken about forever. Trent’s magic act in the slightly more difficult version of the scenario is buried in the annals of NFL history, because life isn’t fair when you’re Trent Green, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. A 14 yard pass to Samie Parker and a 34 yard pass to Dante Hall get the Chiefs into FG range.

Only for Lawrence Tynes to miss the season saving 41 yard field goal attempt.

No. That’s not possible. It’s inconceivable. We’re inside, and it’s only 41 yards. It’s not like this field goal was a prayer. How could this have happened?

I watched it with my own two eyes. Lawrence pushed it to the right. I know how it happened, but I still cannot believe it. Some things you have to see to believe, and other things you don’t believe, even once you see. Imagine if Harrison Butker missed the FG after Patrick Mahomes’ magic act in the 2021 playoffs. How would you have felt then?

That’s how we feel right now.

Our season is not over from here, but now we need help from the Pittsburgh Steelers in order to make the playoffs, and as we know, the Steelers are deep in the midst of the eight game winning streak that will carry them all the way to a win in Super Bowl 40. The help we need isn’t coming, so I have to sit here slack jawed as I tell you that our season is over now. We’re not going to the playoffs.

Again.

We do lose one further game to the New York Giants, but it matters none, as even with an 11-5 record we still would’ve missed the playoffs. We win the final two games of the season, which could’ve been two of the more important games in Chiefs’ history if not for Lawrence Tynes’ miss, against the Chargers and Bengals by a combined score of 57-10.

We do make a mockery of the AFC playoffs by crushing their participants in this fashion, but in the end this doesn’t matter either. The KC Chiefs finish the season ranked fifth in the stacked 2005 AFC in terms of EPA difference, with head to head wins over the Broncos, Bengals, Patriots, and Chargers, but miss the playoffs despite their 10-6 record, only the fourth team in NFL history to do so under the 12 team playoff format.

Putting this in perspective, the Miami Dolphins had missed the playoffs with a 10-6 record as recently as 2003, but before then, no team had missed the playoffs with a record as good as 10-6 since both the 10-6 Philadelphia Eagles and 10-6 San Francisco 49ers both missed the NFC playoffs in 1991. In fact, the entire reason the NFL created the 12 team playoff format in 1990 was because they were tired of double digit win teams missing the playoffs.

Trent Green’s bad luck is so pervasive that he engineered a team with double digit wins to miss a tournament that’s whole purpose (explicitly stated by the NFL) was to include all double digit win teams. It literally causes the Chiefs to violate NFL directives.

As recently as last season, in 2004, there were two NFL playoff teams that got in with 8-8 records. Not us of course, because this is the Trent Green story, we got stuck with a nightmare schedule and the league’s worst defence, and went 7-9 last year as a result. As soon as next season, in 2006, the New Orleans Saints will be rewarded with a first round bye for their 10-6 record. What are the 2005 KC Chiefs rewarded with?

We’re rewarded with nothing. That’s the Trent Green story.

If it weren’t for that damn missed field goal in Dallas, everything could’ve been different. Trent’s 0.158 EPA/Play (7th) and 6.86 ANY/A (5th) could’ve been rewarded with a playoff appearance. All of a sudden that Pittsburgh playoff spot could’ve been ours, and look at the Steelers’ path to the Super Bowl. It’s littered with Chiefs victims.

The Steelers beat the Cincinnati Bengals in the first round of the 2005 playoffs. You know, the Bengals team we defeated 37-3 in the regular season. After that, they defeated the Colts. Lord only knows what we would’ve done with yet another chance against the Colts. We’ve got their number. We do not punt against the Indianapolis Colts. Normal logic does not apply when the Chiefs play the Colts. Just look what happened in 2004. I think we can win that game, which leaves us with an AFC Championship game against the permanent obstacles in Denver. That’s a game we’ve already won several times over the years.

I see no reason why the Steelers’ path couldn’t have been the Chiefs’ path, especially with our prior successes against Indianapolis, which are slim, but slim is better than everybody else’s when the Patriots have turned into the laughing stock that they were in 2005. The Steelers needed a missed FG to defeat the Colts. We wouldn’t have needed that. I assure you.

Instead, Lawrence Tynes missed the field goal in Dallas, and now we’re here, at home, having to watch as the Steelers take the path that should’ve been ours and ride it to the Super Bowl that could’ve been ours. As for our man personally, it’s been a long year, with it beginning with the R word, progressing through the death of his father, only for it to end with the all-too-familiar heartbreak that’s become the calling card of his story.

0.158 EPA/Play (7th) and 6.86 ANY/A (5th) is a step back in terms of individual performance. There’s no question about that, which ought to tell you something about how great this guy is, but if we just ignore the horror show in Buffalo that’s 0.212 EPA/Play instead, which is a step back from His Year last year, but not out of line with his career norms. All of this as Brett Favre’s performance plummeted to by far the worst numbers of his career (except 1993) in 2005. It seems as if the league’s two old gunslingers are fighting different aging curves.

The age of 35 has been tough on Brett Favre, but it hasn’t seemed to put a dent in Trent Green’s performance. Perhaps Trent was destined to age more gracefully than Brett did. Perhaps our man was about to hit the wall also. Unfortunately, we will never know the answer to this question, because it’s not age that will take Trent Green’s prime from him. In fact, it’s already over.

We have just seen the last season of elite football that Trent Green will ever play.

Click back next time for the explanation of why this is, and the beginning of the end of Trent Green’s NFL career.

Thanks so much for reading.