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Team Name: Kansas City Chiefs Hometown: Kansas City, American Football Conference (AFC) » Team History     » Team Schedule

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2009 Kansas City Chiefs Schedule

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In 1959 Lamar Hunt, son of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, began discussions with other businessmen to establish an American football organization that would rival the National Football League. The organization would later be known as the American Football League, and Hunt established a team of his own for the league after being denied ownership of an NFL franchise. The Dallas Texans, as they were known then, shared the Cotton Bowl with the NFL's cross-town competition, the Dallas Cowboys.

In one of the Texans' biggest games, they defeated the Houston Oilers in a dramatic 1962 AFL Championship that went into double overtime. Until the December 25, 1971, playoff game between the Chiefs and Dolphins, the game was the longest ever played at over 77 minutes.

After three seasons -- including an AFL championship in 1962 -- it was apparent that Dallas couldn't support two teams. Hunt investigated opportunities to move his team to several cities for the 1963 season, wanting to find a city to which he could commute easily from Dallas. He eventually turned to Kansas City, where Mayor H. Roe Bartle persuaded him to move to the Midwest.

Most impressive about this move was the support the team received from the community even before the team announced the move. Hunt made the move dependent upon the ability of Kansas City Mayor H. Roe Bartle and the Kansas City community to guarantee him 35,000 in season ticket sales. Hunt had arrived at this number because that was the Texans' average attendance at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

Hunt, with a roster replete with players who had played college football in Texas, wanted to maintain a lineage to the team’s roots and wanted to call the club the "Kansas City Texans". "The Lakers stayed the Lakers when they moved from Minnesota to California," he reasoned. "But Jack Steadman convinced me that wasn’t too smart. It wouldn’t sell." The team was renamed the Kansas City Chiefs—one of the most popular suggestions Hunt received in a name-the-team contest, along with "Kansas City Mules" -- and began playing in Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium in 1963.

The name "Chiefs" is derived from Mayor Bartle, who 35 years prior, founded the Native American-based honor society known as The Tribe of Mic-O-Say within the Boy Scouts of America organization, which earned him the nickname, "The Chief."

The Texans/Chiefs franchise was the flagship team of the American Football League, with the most playoff appearances as an AFL team, six (tied with Oakland), the most American Football League Championships (3), and the most Super Bowl appearances, playing in the first Super Bowl, and in the last to be played between League champions. The Texans won the classic 1962 double-overtime AFL championship game against the Houston Oilers, 20-17, at the time the longest, and still one of the best professional football championship games ever played. The Chiefs dropped the first Super Bowl to the Packers, then pulverized the Vikings 23-7 in the final "true" AFL-NFL World Championsip game after the AFL's last season in 1969. They had just one coach throughout their AFL history, Hall-of-Famer Hank Stram.

The Chiefs' first Kansas City home was at 22nd and Brooklyn, called Municipal Stadium, which opened in 1923 and had 49,002 seats. In 1972, the Chiefs moved into the new Arrowhead Stadium. Municipal Stadium, also formerly the home of the Kansas City Royals, the minor-league Kansas City Blues and, most successfully, the Negro Leagues' Kansas City Monarchs, was demolished in 1976 and is now a community garden. The Chiefs' first game at Arrowhead Stadium was against the St. Louis Cardinals (Chiefs 24, St. Louis Cardinals 14).

Arrowhead Stadium is half of the Truman Sports Complex, along with Kauffman Stadium (formerly Royals Stadium). Kansas City was viewed as taking an unnecessary risk at the time by building two stadiums instead of the popular multi-use stadiums being built in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. However, with demolition in 2005 of St. Louis's Busch Stadium, the Truman Sports Complex has now outlived all of the multi-use stadiums built in the same era. While many applaud the Kansas City decision makers for this decision, the move was not quite by design. When it became readily apparent the old Municipal Stadium was not adequate for the Chiefs, the decision was made to build a multi-use stadium for the Chiefs and Charlie Finley's Kansas City A's. Finley proved to be too difficult to work with, demanding a "baseball stadium that could also be used for football" or a baseball only stadium, instead of the other way around.

After much vitriol behind the scenes, Finley decided to move the team to Oakland. However, the discussion made Bartle and his advisors convinced that one stadium would be good but not great. Thus, the decision was made to build two separate stadiums after Finley left town. Coincidentally, Finley moved to Oakland's Alameda County Coliseum, a multi-use stadium in which the A's have played since moving there in 1967.

Information excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/ and
www.kcchiefs.com. ©2007 Kansas City Chiefs. All Rights Reserved.
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