After Last Year's Super Bowl, A Hundred Families Got Free Dogs

We asked readers which NFL team they wanted us to dig up dirt on, and reader Rudy B. suggested we instead hunt down a nice story about one of the teams. Fine, Rudy, challenge accepted. Today, we won't be talking about injuries, or embezzlement, or murder, or noise complaints. We'll talk about the Kansas City Chiefs' 2019 season, which ended with lots of happy dogs.

Early on, defensive lineman Derrick Nnadi pledged that every time the team won, he would go to a shelter and pay the adoption fees on a dog there. Thanks to previous charity stuff, Nnadi had been named as the players' association Community MVP (an honor that requires the MVP to donate a further $10,000 to charity), but this dog stunt was a separate smaller thing, and he probably didn't think it would be a big deal.

But the Chiefs kept winning. They won 12 games, and so he paid for 12 dogs to go to families. They won two more in the postseason, sending them to the Super Bowl. The Chiefs hadn't won a championship in nearly 50 years, and Nnadi declared that if they did win this time, he'd pay for every dog in the shelter. They did win, and so he paid for 108 families to get dogs.

If you've never adopted a dog from a shelter, you might be unaware that adoption fees are even a thing. They are: It often costs hundreds of dollars to adopt a dog. The shelter says these fees cover spaying, vaccinations, and outfitting the dog with a microchip. With these 108 adoptees, a pet food company also joined in to ease the family's burden, giving them a year of free dog food each.

Obviously, the families were all Chiefs fans, a community that might just include the most enthusiastic fans of all. They're the only fans, as far as we know, who have ever risked a penalty for cheering too much. At one 1990 home game, the referee got so sick of the noise that he warned the crowd he'd dock the Chiefs a timeout unless their fans quieted down.

Sorry, we lied before. We did end up talking about a noise complaint.

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