‘Burrowhead? We’re in Burrow’s head’: The meaning inside a fired-up Chiefs locker room

Confetti is falling on the field, red and yellow flakes in sub-freezing temperatures, but Chiefs players leave that celebration behind in favor of another, this one inside the more intimate setting of their locker room.

This place is buzzing, just as you’d probably expect, though its reasoning stretches far beyond the trip to the Super Bowl in Arizona that awaits after a 23-20 win against the Bengals.

That will cover the majority of this column, but let’s start 50 feet south of the red double doors that serve as the entrance to the home locker room at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. Bryan Cook, a Chiefs rookie safety, has skipped the initial party to tightly squeeze the back of a family member in a nearby hallway, tears rolling down his face. This was a story of personal redemption, he would say.

On the north side of the tunnel, still outside the doors, a parade of players and coaches strolls by a small contingent of media and fans.

“Hey,” special teams coordinator Dave Toub stops to say, “How about Skyy (Moore)?” And that’s another story of personal redemption.

Toub disappears, and as the parade continues, a cloud of cigar smoke covers the face of edge rusher Frank Clark.

“Told ya’ll,” he would say.

His defensive coordinator, Steve Spagnuolo, waves toward the group of about three dozen fans.

“You killed it!” one of them shouts. And there’s one more story of personal redemption.

The double doors spring open, and the energy is popping, with Kansas City celebrities like Eric Stonestreet and Paul Rudd mixing it up with some of the best athletes in the world.

Patrick Mahomes is on his iPhone at his locker, and he’s apparently opening the Twitter app, because soon he will fire off a reference to American bowler Pete Weber. The reference:

“Who do you think you are? I am!”

In the back corner of the room, several Chiefs players remain in their pads, a gray AFC Champions shirt tucked neatly over them. The conversation is, well, captivating.

“Burrowhead deez nuts,” one says.

“Burrowhead?” another replies. “We’re in Burrow’s head.”

And then he turns to a reporter.

“If you use that,” he says, “leave my name out of it.”

Fair enough.

This is the aftermath for a team that just won its biggest game of the season, some of the players the biggest game of their lives. But this celebration is personal, because these guys believe the Bengals made it so.

It was cornerback Mike Hilton who coined the phrase “Burrowhead,” a reference to his quarterback, Joe Burrow, winning at Arrowhead Stadium last season in the AFC Championship Game.

“I think guys were probably the most pumped up I’ve ever seen them going into a football game,” Mahomes said, adding in reply to a follow-up, “I mean, the mayor came at me.”

Sure enough, Cincinnati mayor Aftab Pureval, a man who makes a career out of strategic decisions, made such a blunder in his lame version of trash talk that Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce mentioned him on the makeshift stage post-game: “I got some words for the Cincinnati mayor: ‘Know your role and shut your mouth, you jabroni.”

A team that spent the majority of the year as the odds-on favorite to finish its season in Glendale, Arizona felt disrespected, and they’d like you to believe that’s what elicited all of these notable reactions — from the field, to the tunnel, to the locker room, to the post-game lectern in the media room.

But it’s only part of the story.

The Chiefs needed this win, more than they probably care to admit — more than we could say they’ve needed a win since Andy Reid arrived a decade ago.

For the first time in the Mahomes Era, they not only felt like playoff underdogs but for a few days this week, they were a playoff underdog. Mahomes denied that, by the way, at a moment in which it was factually the case. Couldn’t come to acknowledge it.

There will be more times in his career in which it seems as though the proverbial deck is stacked against him. But the significance of this particular obstacle is that it came attached to one specific team — like Michael Jordan’s Bulls running into the roadblock of the Detroit Pistons in the late ‘80s. The analogy doesn’t completely fit, because Mahomes won a Super Bowl trophy three years ago, before this bizarre streak of Cincinnati failures began.

That’s actually what made Sunday feel all the more necessary. All the more consequential.

The Chiefs spent three-plus seasons as the undisputed team to beat in the AFC. That title was slipping from their grasp before they’d even grown accustomed to it, and certainly long before they expected anyone to snatch it. The Bengals had broken the machine and turned its quarterback human. Three times in a calendar year they had beaten the Chiefs, all three times via fourth-quarter comebacks.

They almost had another Sunday, by the way. For about 59 minutes, we were greeted with a replay, from the Chiefs’ fourth-quarter lead to its evaporation. Then a few moments of magic — Cook’s deflected pass after a tough night, Moore’s 29-yard punt return after a tough season, Mahomes’ scramble on a bum ankle and Harrison Butker’s game-winning kick after an injury-riddled year.

The sequences — all the aforementioned tales of individual redemption in their own right — packaged together long-lasting consequences for a franchise that needed to prove to more than a mayor that they could finally beat this team.

A team in search of its own redemption.

Think you heard enough about Cincinnati this season? Heck, Chris Jones said he spent his offseason preparing for this very game. Imagine the fallout if the Bengals made it four straight. Or if they had been responsible for two consecutive postseason exits.

“We wanted to play this team,” Mahomes said.

Needed to play this team.

Because on the other end of it, the Chiefs are the Chiefs again — the top dogs in the AFC.

And on the other end of it, we’re left with validation of an offseason strategy to build for the long haul around a generational quarterback. The Chiefs won with young players, some of them the direct return of the Tyreek Hill trade. They had 10 rookies playing in the championship game Sunday. They took a swing, their biggest cut since Mahomes’ rookie deal expired, and still with the opportunity to trot around the bases.

This was the only way for the story arc to work — for both the quarterback and the team.

Well, there’s one more way.

One more win.