Brutal cold expected for Kansas City’s playoff game

This weekend is the first round of the NFL playoffs and with a home game in Buffalo, the superlatives are flowing. It will be cold, as low as 9 degrees. The players and fans will be freezing. The game will be a war of attrition played on the frozen tundra of…

Wait, wait a minute. Delete that headline.

While it’s true that Buffalo will experience single-digit temperatures for Sunday night’s game between the hometown Bills and the Pittsburgh Steelers, another city is expected to have even worse conditions. Worse. Than. Buffalo.

With the caveat that four-day forecasts aren’t 100 percent accurate, Kansas City, Missouri, is in for a tough week. After the expected snowfall on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, the temperature will be around minus 3 degrees on Saturday evening, when the Kansas City Chiefs coincidentally play the Miami Dolphins.

Here’s your unnecessary Taylor Swift reference: Fans will have to be ‘Fearless’ to cope with these circumstances. And a quick side note for readers outside the United States: minus 3 Fahrenheit is minus 19 degrees Celsius. And the football in question is not football. Okay, keep going.

While baseball games can be rained out, football plays in almost any weather. So those strong Kansas City souls excited to watch their hometown team begin its quest for a second straight Super Bowl will have to join forces and then join some more.

Players will need to do the same and make liberal use of layers of clothing, hand warmers and copious amounts of Vaseline.

At least it will be better on other playoff game sites. Detroit is in the numbers on Sunday evening, but has a domed stadium. Houston (50s on Saturday) and Dallas (30s but later on Sunday) have retractable roofs. And Tampa Bay, Florida, will see showers on Monday, but temperatures in the 70s.

Several games have been heralded as the coldest, snowiest or most miserable in NFL history, but the 1948 championship game in Philadelphia has seniority. A tarp was placed over the field, but so much snow fell on the tarp that players from both teams had to be recruited to remove it before the game. A few minutes later the field was completely covered with freshly fallen snow. The snow obscured the yard markings, making initial decisions mere guesswork. Ultimately, the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Chicago Cardinals 7-0 to win their first championship.

The New York Times suggested the game should have been postponed, but was quickly added: “Don’t say that in front of loyal Philadelphia followers. No matter how wet, cold and uncomfortable they were, they were happy.”

Kansas City fans hope to feel the same way after Saturday.