DENVER (AP) — Frank Clark brought his second Super Bowl ring and a little secret from Kansas City to Denver when he signed with the Broncos after his release from the Chiefs in a salary dump.
The Chiefs, he said, don’t view their AFC West foe as a rival.
“I wouldn’t call it a rivalry. A rivalry is competitive,” Clark said when asked about switching sides in the one-sided series.
“We didn’t call it a rivalry” in Kansas City, he added.
The only players on the Chiefs roster who were around in 2015 when they last lost to the Broncos are tight end Travis Kelce and long snapper James Winchester.
Not a single player on Denver’s roster has beaten the Chiefs while wearing a Broncos uniform.
This series hasn’t been competitive since Peyton Manning was wrapping up his Hall of Fame career in 2015. The Broncos beat K.C. 31-24 in Week 2 of that season, and the Chiefs won the rematch in Denver on the day Manning broke Brett Favre’s NFL career record for passing yards and tore a ligament in his left foot.
Manning would return to guide the Broncos to a triumph in Super Bowl 50, but the torch had been passed in the AFC West.
The Chiefs have won all seven division titles since then and their 15-game winning streak against Denver is the fourth longest by one team over a single opponent in league history.
Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes have guided the Chiefs to three AFC titles in the past four years and two Super Bowl wins, including last year’s 38-35 thriller over Philadelphia.
The Broncos have churned through six head coaches and seven starting quarterbacks while missing the playoffs each of the past seven seasons.
The other teams in the division haven’t fared much better than Denver: the Las Vegas Raiders are 1-9 against Kansas City over the past five seasons and the Los Angeles Chargers are 3-7, with two wins and overtime defeats coming with Justin Herbert under center.
Despite the lopsided nature of the division, many of the Chiefs’ wins have come in one-score games as they always seem to come up big in crunch time on offense, defense and special teams.
That’s because the Chiefs don’t allow complacency to set in, Mahomes said.
“There’s a lot of parity in this league. Anybody can beat anybody,” Mahomes insisted. “And so we have to have that mentality every single day or we will get beat. Especially in the division and the AFC in general. Every single week, every opponent we play is going to play us to the best of their ability, so we have to make sure we go out there with that mentality.”
