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OPINION: Cartoons, Rorschach tests, and interpretations that fall ‘Just Short…’

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A tiresome narrative about the Kansas City Chiefs and NFL officials reached a tipping point this week when Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Adam Zyglis published an illustration captioned “Just Short…” in the Buffalo News.

Zyglis’ cartoon (which we’ll refer to as “Just Short…” from here out) depicts his from-the-hip reaction to the Bills’ defeat at the hands of Kansas City in the AFC Championship Game on Sunday.

‘Just Short…’ made the rounds on social media after Buffalo’s season ended in the AFC championship game, and constituted the first time I had seen a mainstream media outlet run a story (or, I guess, cartoon) that seemed to reinforce the idea that the Chiefs were getting preferential treatment from the NFL’s officials.

On Tuesday, Zyglis posted a picture of “Just Short…” to his official Twitter account with a message that read “Interference… #NFLReferees”:

“Just Short…” features a bound blue buffalo with gritted teeth (ostensibly a stand-in for star quarterback Josh Allen on a memorable failed fourth-down conversion) struggling to run from left to right while the immaculately drawn hand of a referee holds it back on a red leash, which becomes the distinctive stripe in the Bills’ logo.

The chain crew (not pictured) holds its boxy down marker perfectly upright on the near sideline, and it shows that the action is taking place on fourth down.

The forward rod (or “stick,” which shows the line to gain) is tilted slightly to the right — away from the Bills logo, which has its head held over a singular yellow-and-white line on the field.

None of the Chiefs’ defenders are included in Zyglis’ illustration, and the Bills logo is not holding a ball in its canonically swept-back forelegs, which are well short of the line to gain.

I was appalled to see that a Zyglis’ cartoon had made it to print because, on its face, the premise of “Just Short…” — that officials had exercised undue influence to alter the final score of the AFC Championship Game, or otherwise played a role in Kansas City’s recent dominance — has been roundly dismissed by every serious sports outlet.

Now, Zyglis’ medium and mine are completely different. I have never had a particularly keen eye for visual art, or an ability to draw better than about a fourth-grade level, and I’m not the most insightful fellow on the planet.

As a result of these known inadequacies, I had a feeling that maybe I was missing an ironic angle that would be difficult for me to replicate here in the written word (despite my attempt at doing so above) given that Chiefs Wire’s usual quick-and-to-the-point style doesn’t leave much room for protracted prose.

Perhaps, I thought, Zyglis somehow meant to poke fun at the idea that the officials unilaterally swung the AFC Championship Game against Buffalo, and maybe any “joke” he was making just didn’t land for me as a Chiefs fan who is — admittedly — a bit sensitive to the seemingly constant minimization of Kansas City’s achievements that has been taking place on social media lately.

Or, I figured that maybe Zyglis is just a broken-hearted Bills fan who, at the time he sat down to draw “Just Short…”, was more inclined to believe in a grand conspiracy rather than admit his favorite team took a bad loss to a good opponent in a big game without any sort of collusion from a higher power.

We’ve all been there.

So, I reached out to Zyglis directly and was graciously given the chance to interview him about “Just Short…” in an effort to better understand the machinations of a mind that appeared to have embraced the demonstrably false narratives about the Chiefs and NFL officials.

What I found — predictably — was that Zyglis is a master of his craft who is far more eloquent in his preferred form of expression than I could ever hope to be in mine.

When asked about the inception of “Just Short…” Zyglis made it clear that the illustration wasn’t drawn with one play or call in mind.

“My goal is to summarize the biggest takeaway from the game with a strong visual metaphor,” Zyglis explained. “This cartoon was inspired by the series of controversial calls by the refs that held the Bills back at times from getting the edge in an extremely close game. As with any narrow loss, there are many reasons why the Bills didn’t win, from missed opportunities to coaching to a critical defensive injury. In the end, they didn’t find a way. But with two teams so evenly matched, a handful of bad calls at critical times can make a huge difference in the outcome.

“The call that best encapsulated the referee controversy was the ball spot on the fourth-and-1 sequence. In fact, many viewers thought the Bills got the first down the play before. I chose this as the metaphor in the cartoon because it was both the most consequential and the most egregious of the game, with the Bills pushing late to go up by eight points. Referees make mistakes on the field, being human, but the fact that it was reviewed and upheld added fuel to the fire.”

Though the degree to which the officials’ (perceived) errors contributed to the game’s final result is debatable, Zyglis made a point to stop well short of saying that he thinks there was willful or coordinated misconduct by officials that unduly benefited Kansas City or directly prevented Buffalo from winning.

“I wouldn’t argue that the refs were intentionally trying to hinder the Bills – you could never prove that,” Zyglis clarified. “I was simply saying from a practical sense, that key referee decisions and failures held the Bills back in a close game. Intentional or not, two key bad calls were reviewable and upheld. That’s not acceptable with the amount of money in this league and with a ticket to the Super Bowl on the line.”

Regardless of Zyglis’ intent, users on social media took his cartoon and ran with it. Controversial ex-Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown shared a picture of “Just Short…” with his followers on Wednesday, catapulting the illustration into the NFL discourse online.

“The cartoon really took off on X and Instagram,” Zyglis said. “It had over 40,000 likes with former NFL players retweeting it. It really tapped into an undercurrent that has been brewing all year of this distrust of the integrity of NFL games, especially with games involving the Chiefs. In my career I have never seen such a negative national response to the refereeing of a game. With fans fed up with suspicious calls all year, and ‘Chiefs fatigue’ setting in, the cartoon became ripe for the moment. It started as a cartoon for Bills fans and it resonated with a national audience.”

But what if Buffalo had won the AFC Championship Game? Had the matchup ended differently, would the calls against the Bills have warranted an artful outcry?

“In that hypothetical scenario, those bad calls would have not carried the same consequence, so no, I wouldn’t have likely drawn a cartoon on them,” Zyglis conceded. “The loss, and the fact that the game could have gone either way, magnified the calls.”

As it turns out, Zyglis’ decision to leave Kansas City’s defenders — and the ball — out of “Just Short…” was no mistake, nor was the work’s caption just a glib cliché.

“I intentionally left out the Chiefs and the ball because I wanted to show that these bad calls held the team back from progressing,” Zyglis explained. “I wanted to make it bigger than the one play and not about the Chiefs (as good as they did play). The irony of the caption ‘Just Short’ is that the replays suggest they weren’t actually short on that fourth down conversion. It was a way to also suggest Bills fans are proud of the season and the effort they put in. They didn’t fall short in our eyes. Even with the loss they exceeded everyone’s expectations.”

And you know what? I can live with that.

In my initial reaction to “Just Short…”, I failed to consider that Zyglis’ drawing had — in fact — nothing to do with the Chiefs at all, which should have been obvious given that he didn’t depict any of Kansas City’s players in his illustration.

Instead, with a little bit of context, ‘Just Short…’ becomes a poignant truth-telling of a Sisyphean struggle undertaken each year by the Bills and their supporters that was merely co-opted by an all-too-familiar class of online misanthropes who are always eager to add fodder to any unfounded claim they can find an audience for.

What some viewers (like me) saw as a desperate diminishing of undeniably impressive athletic accomplishment by the Chiefs — and others as a lightning rod for a baseless conspiracy — was intended to be neither.

I think the story of “Just Short…” speaks to a moment we’ve found ourselves in as Americans, if not more broadly as humans.

We live in a culture that rewards polarizing rhetoric — both in our online and “meat-space” interactions — and tends to divide folks into competing factions more often than it serves to foster any kind of understanding between people or a civil means of holding differing (but equally valid) perspectives in polite conversation.

As someone who watched his favorite quarterbacks (first Alex Smith, then Patrick Mahomes) struggle for playoff relevance against Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in the mid-to-late 2010s, I can absolutely empathize with Zyglis’ frustration over a few crucial judgment calls, even if I disagree with the notion that they materially altered the outcome of Sunday’s game.

By that same token, I can recognize that Zyglis didn’t draw “Just Short…” in service of a phony narrative about Kansas City and its relationship to officials, as I had initially thought.

Rather, because of my own defensive instinct, I had completely missed Zyglis’ core observation about Buffalo’s enduring quest to win its first Super Bowl, and the tribulations of Bills fans who want nothing more than to see their favorite team succeed in the face of ever-more intense adversity each season.

At its core, “Just Short…” is a Rorschach test for fans across the country who are either content to smell the flowers of the Chiefs’ budding dynasty or anxiously waiting for Kansas City’s run of dominance to wither so other teams can get their chance to earn a ring.

As with any piece of art, “Just Short…” opens itself up to interpretation, even though its message may seem clear at first glance.