There are very few people that are on a first-name basis with the entire city of Kansas City.
Marty is one of those people.
Marty talked this week with 810 WHB's Kevin Kietzmann on Between The Lines about his version of MartyBall and what the Chiefs are doing right now.
"Find out what it is your people do best and do that," he said. "Take the Chiefs right now. When you want to be able to stabilize a franchise -- yeah they used to talk about MartyBall all the time and, yeah, I like to run the ball and play smash mouth but that wasn't the ultimate driving factor in deciding what we did.
"What we decided to do was find out what our guys do best. We had Christian Okoye and Barry Word. We had leadership at quarterback with [Steve] DeBerg and moving forward we had [Joe] Montana for a couple years but the core of what we did was driven by the fact that we could run it better than we could throw it."
Sounds familiar, no?
"This is what I sense that the Chiefs are doing right now. They play really, really good solid hard-nosed defense, they have the ability to run the football and when you look at that part of it you say to yourself, 'This isn't that complicated to figure it out.'"
I love this philosophy -- both smash mouth football and playing to your strengths -- but during Marty's tenure in Kansas City it never resulted in a Super Bowl win. Something always happened in the playoffs. The Bills. The kicker. Elvis Grbac over Rich Gannon. Something always happened.
If things keep going well in KC, we'll find out if something happens this year.