While the Kansas City Chiefs are the NFL's newest dynasty, winning three Super Bowls since 2020, most fans don't recall the team's earliest successful years before decades of futility. What about the underdog losers of that very first Super Bowl? When the Kansas City Chiefs played the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl I in 1967, they had only been in existence for seven seasons and were tasked with the monumental burden of representing the still-fledgling American Football League against the NFL's team of the decade. The Chiefs won their first AFL Championship in 1962, as the Dallas Texans, when owner Lamar Hunt decided the Dallas market couldn't support two pro football teams-it could barely support one. After just three seasons, the Texans relocated to Kansas City, where they became the Chiefs. Under future Hall-of-Famers Len Dawson, Buck Buchanan, and Johnny Robinson, they were the winningest AFL team and helped integrate pro football more than any other team in the 1960s. In The Team That History Forgot, Rick Gosselin explores the team's struggles and triumphs in its early years, the competition created by the AFL in player signing wars, the recruitment of athletes from historically Black colleges and universities, the loss of the franchise identity with the move from Texas to Kansas City, the first Super Bowl and the humiliating loss against the Packers, and the moves the Chiefs made to recover from that loss and win Super Bowl IV, the last game before the two rival leagues finally merged in 1970. The early Chiefs set a bar for excellence that the team continues to pursue today.
Rick Gosselin is a Pro Football Hall of Fame journalist who has covered the Detroit Lions, New York Giants, Kansas City Chiefs, and Dallas Cowboys. He became a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee in 1988 and has served on the board's senior committee for more than twenty years. He is the author of Goodfellows: The Champions of St. Ambrose. Andy Reid is the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs.
List of Illustrations Foreword Introduction Chapter 1: The AFL Chapter 2: The Dallas Texans Chapter 3: Dallas Chapter 4: Len Dawson Chapter 5: Johnny Robinson Chapter 6: Kansas City Chapter 7: HBCU Chapter 8: Bobby Bell Chapter 9: The AFL West Chapter 10: The Merger Chapter 11: Mike Garrett Chapter 12: The Buffalo Bills Chapter 13: Hank Stram Chapter 14: Western Dominance Chapter 15: The Rockpile Chapter 16: A Dallas Showdown? Chapter 17: The Lombardi Packers Chapter 18: A Fear of the Unknown Chapter 19: The College All-Star Game Chapter 20: Otis Taylor Chapter 21: The Hammer Chapter 22: The Interview Chapter 23: Hope Chapter 24: Adjustments Chapter 25: The Interception Chapter 26: The Sting of Defeat Chapter 27: Jan Stenerud Chapter 28: Willie Lanier Chapter 29: The Chicago Bears Chapter 30: The Long Road Back Chapter 31: The Minnesota Vikings Chapter 32: The Dallas Cowboys Epilogue Acknowledgements
"If I could pick one person to write a history book about any era of football, give me Rick Gosselin. His perspective on the Chiefs in The Team that History Forgot is perfect, vivid, needed, and important. From his first sentence (Lamar Hunt's nickname as a kid) to his last chapter (how Bob Lilly nearly was a Chief), Gosselin makes the roots of a proud franchise come to life. The stories in here absolutely sing."-Peter King, veteran football writer and three-time National Sportswriter of the Year "Rick Gosselin is the best person to explain the history of the game, not because he has worked in the NFL for the past forty years, but because he has lived in the NFL studying the game, the players, the coaches and how champions are made. Gosselin educates us with vivid detail and storytelling on the best team no one seems to remember."-Michael Lombardi, general manager for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels football team and author of Football Done Right: Setting the Record Straight on the Coaches, Players, and History of the NFL "Rick Gosselin has captured a forgotten time in the overall history of professional football, and he selected the premier team from a talent standpoint not only in the American Football League but the NFL as well. This is a wonderful journey back in time to the birth of the AFL and the dedication and wisdom of Lamar Hunt in his endeavor to 'own a football team.' Canton, Ohio is missing some exceptional players from those Chiefs' teams. Otis Taylor, Jim Tyrer, and Ed Budde were elite players in any era at their respective positions."-Ron Wolf, member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and former general manager of the Green Bay Packers
