On Top of Their Game

In the final analysis, it only took one guy—Stan Kroenke—and 790 million of his dollars to bring the entirety of Missouri into the Kansas City Chiefs Kingdom. When the owner of the St. Louis Rams abruptly and classlessly pulled that team out of the Gateway City in 2016, it left the eastern half of the state without its historical ties to pro football.

The sting was palpable for Rams fans who had experienced the same kind of grief three decades earlier when their beloved Cardinals took wing to Arizona. That left St. Louis fans—again—with the choice of either adopting the Chiefs from the western half of the state or looking east about the same distance, 250 miles, to the Indianapolis Colts. Beyond those, the options were the Tennessee Titans or Chicago Bears, about 300 miles distant. As for the Minnesota Vikings or Green Bay Packers? Those were day-long drives each way. Weekend-killers for barely three hours of on-field action.

For those in Missouri who aligned with Kansas City, though, the rewards have been tangible: A year after the Rams departed, the Chiefs drafted a young quarterback by the name of Patrick Mahomes. In seven full NFL seasons since his arrival, he’s already broken nearly every record for NFL quarterbacks at that stage of their careers and has a great deal of runway ahead. Four times in five years, he’s taken the Chiefs to the Super Bowl, winning three of those. And now the team is poised to make NFL history if it can win a third straight Lombardi Trophy.

In light of that kind of performance, Missourians who jumped on the KC Bandwagon can be forgiven for asking, “Stan Who?” when it comes to the man whose Rams won a single Super Bowl in 1999. That was the franchise’s only appearance in the title game while based in St. Louis.  

Beyond the NFL

For sports fans, though, Missouri is bigger than Kansas City and the Chiefs. Why?

• It has a pair of pro baseball franchises in the storied St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals, who have won 13 World Series titles between them and made 23 appearances. Yes, yes, the Cards have done the heavy lifting there (11 championships in 19 appearances), but the Royals have made the two most recent appearances, losing to San Francisco in seven games in 2014 and winning it all in 2015, a five-game thrashing of the New York Mets.

• It has the University of Missouri, a member of perhaps college football’s most valuable athletic conference, in terms of revenues. The Tigers made the move to the Southeastern Conference in 2011 after 101 seasons in the old Big Six/Eight/XII affiliation. During that stretch, the Tigers won a dozen conference championships, earned three dozen bowl invitations (11 of them from New Year’s Day Bowls), and are coming off a 14-3 Cotton Bowl victory over Ohio State, which many had predicted would win college football’s 2023 championship.

• It has Division I basketball: Mizzou again connects residents with teams from the ever-expanding SEC, bringing to Columbia some high-profile programs such as Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas, Auburn and Tennessee. But the Show-Me State is also home to D-I teams like the Saint Louis University Billikens, the University of Missouri-Kansas City Kangaroos, the Missouri State Bears, and Southeast Missouri State’s Redhawks.

• Soccer, soccer, soccer: Flanked by pro sports franchises in each major metro area (Sporting Kansas City and St. Louis City SC) of the Major Soccer League, Missouri is an emerging player on the national soccer stage. Part of that has to do with Kansas City’s emergence as a soccer capital; the owners of Sporting KC have done ground-breaking work to build a soccer culture throughout the KC region from the elementary school level up.

Those same interests succeeded in 2022 in what many would have previously thought to be incomprehensible: Kansas City’s selection as a host city for the FIFA World Cup in 2026. 

In addition, the Kansas City Current opened play this year in the world’s first pro-soccer venue designed and built specifically for women’s play in the National Women’s Soccer League, and the NWSL is working towards establishing a franchise in St. Louis.

• NHL Hockey: The St. Louis Blues have a dedicated fan base that, in some ways, is hockey’s version of the Chicago Cubs. They’re patient, but they have to be. In 2019, the Blues won the Stanley Cup as league champions but had to wait 52 years since their previous appearance in that series. The three other times they advanced that far came in consecutive years from 1968-70, losing in each of the three.

• Small-college sports: With a combined 15 teams from NCAA lower divisions (11 DII and four DIII programs) and 15 more small colleges that are members of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, no Missouri resident is ever very far from collegiate-level competition in football, basketball and other athletic events. 

• Weekend-warrior activities: Across the state, there are boundless opportunities for sports fans to engage their interests, as well. Organized amateur team sports for rugby, softball and other sports are easily accessible, and for the individual, there’s no shortage of venues for swimming, boating, hunting, fishing, biking, hiking or other outdoor activities.