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Nzoner's Game Room>Terez Paylor has passed away.
Sassy Squatch 04:31 PM 02-09-2021

It is with a heavy heart that we announce that our beloved friend, colleague and Yahoo Sports journalist Terez Paylor has passed away.

Statement from Ebony Reed, Terez's fiancée: pic.twitter.com/oUFlJsXnSk

— Yahoo Sports (@YahooSports) February 9, 2021

[Reply]
KChiefs1 12:17 AM 01-27-2022
https://theathletic.com/3088428/2022...-terez-paylor/

On Unforgettable Night for the Chiefs, Remembering Terez Paylor
By
Rustin Dodd

Originally Posted by :
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It was late on Sunday night, in the hours after a classic, after Josh Allen had silenced Arrowhead Stadium for the first time, and after Patrick Mahomes had found Tyreek Hill streaking over the middle, and after Allen had answered in just 49 seconds, and after Mahomes had made something out of nothing with 13 seconds left. It was after each quarterback had turned the sport of football into something closer to art, putting on perhaps the greatest quarterback duel in the history of the NFL, and I kept thinking about one person: my friend Terez Paylor.

Terez, of course, had a name for nights like Sunday in Kansas City, a description for the moments when Mahomes simply will not lose, when he does something so ridiculous and so otherworldly that you cannot help but gasp — like when he gets the ball with 13 seconds left and his Chiefs team trailing the Bills by three points in an the AFC Divisional Round. On this night, Chiefs coach Andy Reid told Mahomes that the situation was grim, so be “the grim reaper.” Mahomes completed two passes for 44 yards. Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker sent the game to overtime. Mahomes completed his final nine pass attempts and engineered an eight-play, 75-yard game-winning drive in overtime in a 42-36 victory.

This, as Terez would say, was an “Over My Dead Body” game.

It didn’t matter if Allen was sensational himself, completing 27 of 37 for 329 yards and rushing for another 68. It didn’t matter if the Bills’ defense had been specifically constructed to combat Mahomes. It didn’t matter that there was only 13 seconds left.

It didn’t matter because the Chiefs had Patrick Mahomes, and he was not going to lose, and for a moment on Sunday night, as Mahomes hit Kelce with a back-shoulder pass in the end zone for the game-winning touchdown and fireworks exploded over Arrowhead Stadium, I kept thinking about Terez.

Man, he would have loved this football game.

If you are a fan of the Chiefs or a serious NFL fan, you probably know Terez as the former Chiefs beat writer for The Kansas City Star who ascended to a national job at Yahoo! Sports and became one of the pre-eminent voices on the NFL before he died last February at the age of 37. In Kansas City, my hometown, Terez was something more than a beat writer, closer to a spiritual counselor for Chiefs Kingdom, a journalist who understood the joys and sorrows of his audience, who could offer insight and analysis, who once went on local television and commiserated with Chiefs fans about a Super Bowl drought that had lasted for nearly five decades.

“Year after year after year after year after year after year,” he said.

Terez and I worked together for eight years at The Star, and when he died last year, a Chiefs fan named Michael Guerry reached out to me unprompted and told me that it felt like he’d lost a family member. Like most fans, Guerry didn’t know Terez, but he was close to the same age and he definitely felt like he did, and when I reached back out to this week to ask Guerry what it was that fostered such a strong connection, he had a quick answer: Authenticity, he said. Terez felt real, whether you knew him well or not, and that personality — that passion and enthusiasm — defined his writing and coverage.

It has felt like something has been missing during this Chiefs season, and it wasn’t just the defense during the opening month. When I’d watch a Chiefs game, I often found myself thinking about Terez, seeing the game through his eyes, imagining his old Twitter bits about Pat Summerall’s minimalistic announcing or Mahomes as Baba Yaga, a reference to “John Wick.” Terez, of course, had graduated to cover the entire NFL in 2018, but that didn’t matter, either, because he was still something like the soul of Chiefs coverage, Detroit-born but adjusted to the vibes of Kansas City fans. So when I returned home to Kansas City this week, I did the most obvious thing: I put on a Terez Paylor “All-Juice Team” sweatshirt, headed out to watch a football game, and spent much of the night repeating the same words in my head: Wow, this is Terez’s kind of football game.

Safe to say he would’ve loved every second, the heavyweight quarterback fight, the battles up front, the cat-and-mouse between Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll and Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, the playoff atmosphere in Kansas City, and the way it wasn’t just one young star quarterback playing an “Over My Dead Body” game, it was two. (According to Stats Perform, no quarterback in NFL history had ever passed for 300 yards, thrown at least three touchdowns, completed 70 percent of their passes, had zero interceptions and rushed for 65 yards while leading their team in rushing; both Mahomes and Allen did that on Sunday.)

If you knew Terez, you know he was the kind of football writer who could appreciate the technique of a great defensive tackle as much as he could appreciate a great quarterback, but Sunday night was football at its best, two superstars trading body shots, two of the sport’s best fan bases hanging on every play, one quarterback adding to his young legend, everything you could ever want. “I’ll remember this game for the rest of my life,” Mahomes told reporters.

In the moments after the game-winning touchdown, Mahomes had joined the mob of Chiefs players in the end zone, celebrating for a few seconds before peeling away and jogging across the field, looking for Allen in the postgame chaos. He had finished with 378 yards passing and three touchdowns, and he had saved the season with 13 seconds left. Reid would call Sunday “one of the great games you could ever play in.” The Chiefs will play the Bengals next week, hosting the AFC Championship Game for the fourth straight year. And it was shortly after all of this, as I walked outside of Arrowhead on Sunday night, that I recalled that it was Terez, of course, who first told me to watch for Mahomes as a potential answer for Kansas City.

It was early April in 2017, and Terez and I were talking for an ill-conceived podcast with shoddy production. The Chiefs hadn’t drafted a quarterback in 24 years. Terez told me to watch out for Mahomes. The fit, he said, was good. The tools were incredible. He might be the perfect quarterback for Andy Reid.

When it came to football, Terez was almost always right.

Terez would have turned 38 on Jan. 28. If you’d like to donate to the scholarship in his name at Howard University,

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
[Reply]
Titty Meat 12:19 AM 01-27-2022
Should let his family bang the drum
[Reply]
RunKC 04:54 PM 02-09-2022
1 year ago today. Miss this dude ☹️
[Reply]
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