Chiefs’ Rise Tied to Camp : NFL: Attitude adjustment in preseason has helped team to 8-1 record.

This was the year the Kansas City Chiefs were supposed to hit bottom, the year that no Joe Montana meant no playoffs and no winning record, the year that Coach Marty Schottenheimer was in danger of losing his job.

Yeah, right.

Here we are, almost at the stretch run to the playoffs, and the Chiefs (8-1) have the best record in the AFC. And get this. Despite such an imposing record, the Chiefs don’t believe they’ve hit stride just yet.

“We’re right where we should be right now, but we really have yet to play a complete game,� wide receiver Lake Dawson said.

So what’s behind the Chiefs’ resurgence? Well, start with attitude, the kind of attitude Schottenheimer introduced by staging one of his most brutal training camps ever.

“It was no more difficult than ’89 or ‘90,� he said.

That was when Schottenheimer was trying to turn around a struggling team that had won only four games in each of the two years prior to his arrival in 1989. Schottenheimer went back to that approach after easing off in 1994 at his players’ request.

Net result: The Chiefs went from 11-5 in ’93 to 9-7 in ’94.

“I made an error in judgment in 1994,� he said. “I didn’t want to make the same mistake again.�

He didn’t. The Chiefs have jumped to the head of the AFC with sound work from Montana understudy Steve Bono, who has completed nearly 60 percent of his passes and has 16 touchdown passes and only five interceptions. And the defense, an under-achieving unit that ultimately failed the team in five consecutive playoff seasons, has been playing near its peak under new defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham, the former Raiders defensive line coach.

Put it all together, and you have the surprise team of the AFC.

If the Chiefs are truly for real in their first life-after-Montana season, then we will find out over the next six weeks, when they hit the meat of their schedule. Five of their next six games are against teams with winning records, and four of those are on the road. It starts Sunday in San Diego and also features games at Dallas, Oakland and Miami.

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It stinks. It just plain stinks.

Art Modell wrenching the Browns away from Cleveland is a travesty that supersedes even Colts owner Robert Irsay’s midnight dash out of Baltimore 11 years ago, when he backed in the moving vans on a cold winter’s night to sneak the Colts out of town and into Indianapolis.

Let’s hope Modell’s fellow owners and commissioner Paul Tagliabue feel similarly outraged by standing up against the move. Even in spite of a threatened lawsuit -- isn’t it always the threat of a lawsuit? -- the owners should do everything in their power to make sure Cleveland keeps its beloved Browns. And Tagliabue must take the lead in this, the defining moment of his tenure as commissioner.

Losing football in Los Angeles, where fans had become apathetic toward both the Rams and Raiders, is one thing. But losing football in Cleveland, where Browns devotees are among the elite in any sport, is quite another. If Modell is allowed to pursue the greener financial pastures in Baltimore, then it is an unmitigated disaster that signals a major crossroads in the NFL’s popularity.