Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) took time on Monday to troll a couple of Cincinnati Bengals players and the city’s mayor after the Kansas City Chiefs’s victory Sunday in the AFC Championship game.
“Today I rise to honor my Kansas City Chiefs for their AFC championship and their berth in Super Bowl LVII,” the first-term lawmaker said in a speech on the House floor Monday, one day after the Chiefs beat the Bengals to clinch a spot in the NFL championship game.
Alford said he and Missourians were proud of the Chiefs’s effort during the game, noting how the team dealt with multiple injuries, “outside noise” from the opposing team’s fanbase and questionable calls from the game’s officiating crew.
“The Chiefs made short work of the ‘Bungles,’ I mean Bengals, and sent them off to the offseason,” Alford said, invoking a common joke about the Cincinnati football team.
Alford also took a jab at Bengals defensive back Eli Apple and Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval (D), referring to him as a “Mayor Jabroni.”
Pureval threw shade at the Chiefs’s star quarterback Patrick Mahomes and referred to the Chiefs’s home stadium, Arrowhead Stadium, as “Burrowhead,” a play on Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow’s recent success in Kanas City. The mayor’s remarks led Chiefs star tight end Travis Kelce to call him out on separate occasions during the Chiefs’s post-game celebration after their 23-20 win, at one point calling him a “jabroni.”
“I hope Eli Apple has fun in Cancun, and I also hope that Mayor Jabroni and the rest of the Cincinnati fan base learned a valuable lesson last night: It is called Arrowhead,” Alford said.
Alford concluded by praising several Chiefs players and mockingly thanking Joseph Ossai, the Bengals defensive end whose unnecessary roughness penalty on Mahomes with eight seconds left in the game cleared a path to victory for the Chiefs.
The Chiefs will take on the NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII on Feb. 12 in Glendale, Ariz. It will be the Chiefs’s third Super Bowl appearance in four years and Eagles’s first appearance since winning Super Bowl LII in 2018.