[Rain Man]

Here's the 2018 update of the Franchise Wellness Index.

We currently stand at a franchise index of +9.3144. We briefly surpassed that level this season after the Week 14 win over the Ravens (9.7952 index) and the Week 17 win over the Raiders (9.5342 index), and significantly surpassed it in the win over the Colts in the playoffs. (More on that in a moment.)

To put things into relative perspective, we last approached that level at the end of the regular season in 2003, when we stood at 9.2934, a week before the Indianapolis no-punt game threw us into a long-running funk.

The last time (prior to 2018) that we were above this level was after a Week 10 loss to the Raiders in the year 2000 (the Gunther era), when we stood at 9.9561. This was obviously on the way down from the Marty era so it didn't feel special and we had negative momentum. So whatever. The next week was a 21-7 loss to the 49ers and it would take us 18 years to climb back up to this level.

However, if you aren't aware of this, we were given a loss in our final game this year. After the Colts game and before we lost a Super Bowl on a coin flip, our Chiefs index topped out at a level of +12.4388. We haven't seen that level of happiness in a long time.

Going back through time to find the last moment we were above a 12.4388, we had a local high of 13.0559 in, believe it or not, 1999. Gunther's Chiefs were riding a four-game winning streak, sitting at 9-5 after a win in Pittsburgh, and we had a ten-year tailwind of Marty propping up our morale. Alas, we lost the next week to Seattle and then lost a heartbreaker to Oakland that knocked us out of a playoff spot. (I think this was the Jon Baker game.)

But things are looking good! It looks like we're happier now than at pretty much any time during the Vermeil era, and we're at around the level that Marty's teams were in 1995. Plus, we now have a franchise quarterback. Investors are bullish on the Chiefs.