Tradition Tuesday: Keepin' Up Appearances, Tradition-Style

The Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos. We know 'em, love 'em, and hate 'em. All at once. This, Tradition Tuesday, is our weekly state-of-the-rivalry address, wherein we aim to keep The Tradition -- a nine-year-old gig in which The Iron Triangle travels to one another's stadiums and seldom remembers fresh sanitizer for our tongs -- alive and going. This time of year, we can say a few things. They usually have to do with training camp being a couple of days away, draft-pick signings, and schedule analyses.

Today, however, we bring you none of the above. In fact, we're going to look at some highlights. Two come in the form of newspaper excerpts. Two are video compilations of the days of yore. All of them, after the jump.

USA Today is running a feature on the history of all 10 American Football League franchises. The article on Kansas City calls the Chiefs the toast of the league, and has lines such as "the club reeled off an AFL-best 87 victories, won a league-record three titles and developed half a dozen Hall of Famers, all while bringing innovation and integration to the gridiron," and "the Chiefs field a superior product on the field," and, most especially "'Before there was a player, coach or a general manager in the league, there was Lamar Hunt,' late Boston Patriots owner William Sullivan said at Hunt's Hall of Fame induction in Canton, Ohio, in 1972. 'Hunt was the cornerstone, the integrity of the league. Without him, there would have been no AFL.'"

The Denver installment has a few choice lines as well: "'A playbook? 'They put the plays on a blackboard, and you had to copy them. That was it...There weren't any handouts,'" and "'We were like lost souls when we traveled. Everything was second-class,'" and especially "'Kansas City was using three- and four-receiver sets. They were really ahead of the curve. We hated to play them because we had to look at so many formations.'"

Read the piece on the Chiefs here; the Broncos installment is here.

In the world of StubTubes, here's some Joe Montana footage:



And, for every Montana clip, there's an equal and opposite Elway highlight reel. The picture isn't that great, but at least the music makes up for it.



That's it for today. No, seriously. That's it. But join us next week where we'll eat chicken fried steak and eggs in the breakfast nook with none other than Scott Pioli and Brian Xanders. We'll have everything on personnel updates to how general managers like their toast (Editor's Note: For quality purposes, we will reserve the right to omit either or both of those items.).