Name: A Chiefs linebacker holds NFL chess championship. It mirrors his approach to football
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A Chiefs linebacker holds NFL chess championship. It mirrors his approach to football

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AdvertisementClose this content / 2Jay Biggerstaff/USA TODAY SportsAt Notre Dame, Drue Tranquill not only was a pillar of the defense and two-year captain but also a first-team Academic All-American with a 3.73 GPA in mechanical engineering. During a long lecture on the history of worship music in his final year of school, some combination of his curious mind and perhaps restlessness led him to ask a nearby classmate what he was playing online.Turned out it was chess, which almost immediately captivated the Chiefs’ linebacker — now the reigning NFL chess champion. We’ll come back to that and how chess even came to inform how he views and plays football. But safe to say the ability to think so strategically, including moves and moves ahead, helps explain why Tranquill has made such a rapid and nimble adjustment to the Chiefs after spending his first four seasons with the Chargers.In place of the injured Nick Bolton, Tranquill last week against the Bears led the team in tackles (eight, including four solo) and combined with George Karlaftis for a sack of quarterback Justin Fields.With Bolton’s ankle injury still rendering him questionable for Sunday’s game at the New York Jets, Tranquill could start again but will be prominent regardless.Athletic as he might be, it’s all enabled by the mind game that defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo was raving about in July when Tranquill almost instantly was being deployed in multiple spots as if he’d been here for years.For that matter, Patrick Mahomes was wishing Tranquill had been here long before.“I hated playing against him, because he’s one of those linebackers who’s, like, calling out what you’re saying at the line of scrimmage. He studies that much,” Mahomes said during training camp in St. Joseph. “So I’ve already had to make up all brand-new code words because I can hear him on the other side.”Whether Tranquill’s mind has become more refined by playing the thinking person’s game or he’s enamored with the game of logic and strategy because his mind is so sharp, one way or another the way he perceives football is connected to how he sees a chessboard.Just to make sure I wasn’t forcing the parallels premise on him, by the way, I asked him Wednesday if he thought I might be trying too hard.“I don’t think so,” he said. “In terms of a mental side, right, everything in life you can draw up metaphors and draw connections to.”As for this one, I first spoke with Tranquill about it one afternoon after a practice in St. Joseph.“I love chess because it’s super strategic, much like football,” Tranquill, who for the most part during the season plays chess online in spare moments or while on the road, said then. “You’ve got a ton of pieces on the football field. You’ve got 11 pieces at any given time. All have to work together for a common cause.“And I think probably one of the most interesting (parts) about chess is you have a strategy and a plan going in. A lot like football, you have a game plan going in, and then your opponent does something (surprising).”More often than not, in fact, that’s the dynamic.“So on the fly you have to change, you have to adapt, you have to adjust,” he said. “So there are a lot of parallels.”When I asked him if the parallels really help on the field, he said, “I think it’s just training, like your synaptic central nervous system, to think quickly on your feet. Especially when you’re playing speed chess … where you don’t have a ton of time to make a decision.“In football, there are split-second decisions every single play. And if you’re able to react and adjust to what you see quickly, I think it certainly helps.”To win, that is. And winning — particularly titles — was one of the reasons Tranquill signed a one-year, $3 million deal with the Chiefs in March.Presto, he claimed a championship just weeks later when he emerged as the de facto best NFL chess player through Chess.com’s “Blitz Champs II.”Never mind that he was a late addition and that the competition was made up of just eight current and former NFL players.That includes the “fun fact,” as Tranquill called it, that among his opponents was Jets guard Wes Schweitzer (as well as Jets linebacker Chazz Surratt) along the way to defeating 2022 champ Chidobe Awuzie of the Bengals for the championship.(Like Tranquill, Awuzie is cognizant of the broader applications of chess … and then some. In a 2021 interview with Bengals.com, he said chess “is helping me in just my general life. Diagnosing things. Predicting things. Protecting important things. I think it’s one of the oldest games because it relates a lot to life. They call it a game of war, and life every day is pretty much a war if you want it to be or whether you know it or not. You fight for love, you fight for life, you fight for the people next to you, all of that.”)When I asked Tranquill Wednesday about the meaning of that championship, he smiled and playfully said, “I’m the chess champ right now until somebody comes and takes me down.”More seriously, he added, “It’s a fun little credential, (and) it’s fun to joke about.”Just the same, after a couple bouts with Tranquill during camp, safety Justin Reid knew Tranquill’s game was no joke.“Be careful what you wish for,” Reid said, smiling, in St. Joe.Speaking of what you wish for …In its own way, this aspect of Tranquill’s game is part of one of his great desires: the chance to win a Super Bowl with the Chiefs.In seeking what he called “the highest honor” of doing that, he said, “it’s really cool to be part of a culture that is driven towards that, that has done that and that looks to do that in the future.”As for his own future, that’s part of why Tranquill hopes to be here for the long haul. But he knows that those hopes rest in constant improvement — just like the way he views playing chess.“You get your butt (kicked) at first, and you get your butt (kicked) as you play better and better people,” he said. “But there’s just so much depth to the game. There’s so much to learn.“It’s kind of like football, where you can never be good enough.”Even so, maybe good enough to be part of the championship he came here to find.Advertisement

AdvertisementClose this content / 2Jay Biggerstaff/USA TODAY SportsAt Notre Dame, Drue Tranquill not only was a pillar of the defense and two-year captain but also a first-team Academic All-American with a 3.73 GPA in mechanical engineering. During a long lecture on the history of worship music in his final year of school, some combination of his curious mind and perhaps restlessness led him to ask a nearby classmate what he was playing online.Turned out it was chess, which almost immediately captivated the Chiefs’ linebacker — now the reigning NFL chess champion. We’ll come back to that...

A Chiefs linebacker holds NFL chess championship. It mirrors his approach to football

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