Super Bowl 59: Alter grad quietly on the cusp of history

Not that the 32-year-old seems like the type of guy who craves attention anyway.

“Obviously it’s a unique week being here,” he told reporters at Super Bowl Opening Night in New Orleans this week. “It’s crazy with all the media and a different schedule in a different city and all the hype, which is great, but at the end of the day we’re here to play a game on Sunday and that’s the main focus. Just trying to make sure the young guys are keeping that No. 1.”

A third-round draft pick out of North Carolina State in 2016, Thuney has a chance to make history Sunday night as the starting left tackle for the Chiefs against the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX.

With a victory, Thuney would join Charles Haley and Tom Brady as the only players with more than four Super Bowl rings.

While Thuney makes a living blocking edge rushers like Haley, who won two for the San Francisco 49ers and three with the Dallas Cowboys in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, he has a more personal connection to Brady.

They were teammates when the quarterback was toward the end of his 20-year run with the New England Patriots. They played in three Super Bowls together, winning two, before Brady moved on to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he won his record seventh in January 2021.

Mike Thuney, Joe’s father, said playing with a superstar like Brady helped prepare Thuney to team up with Patrick Mahomes, who has taken the mantle of best quarterback in the league and won three Super Bowls of his own already.

Joe Thuney also did his part to burnish the legacies of both by helping stabilize the Patriots offensive line as a rookie then signing with the Chiefs as a free agent following a Super Bowl LV loss in which the Kansas City line was dominated by Brady’s Buccs.

“You can talk about the quarterbacks all you want, but they’re not very effective when they don’t have time to throw the ball,” Mike Thuney told the Dayton Daily News. “My brother says he’s kind of the solution. He kind of takes care of problems.”

This year the problem for the Chiefs was left tackle.

Bengals fans might remember Kansas City having issues protecting Mahomes in the Chiefs’ Week 2 win over Cincinnati, but those problems persisted through multiple attempts to fix them as the season wore on.

The Chiefs turned to Thuney ahead of Week 15, and he has held it down well enough to help them reach the NFL’s final game for the third year in a row.

“I’m just taking it a day at a time and trying to prepare the best that I can,” the younger Thuney told reporters in New Orleans. “Coaches and everyone have been so supportive, so I’m just trying to stay on track and just keep getting better day by day.”

He might have downplayed it, but such a move is nothing to take for granted. While Thuney is a four-time All-Pro guard, the skill set to perform at tackle is much different. Instead of wrestling with 320-pound behemoths in close quarters, tackles have to be able to drop back, slide and mirror cat-quick athletes who might just as well be NBA power forwards.

Chiefs coach Andy Reid confirmed as much in a discussion with former Patriots coach Bill Belichick on Jim Gray’s “Let’s Go” podcast last month.

“Bill let me have Joe Thuney, so I appreciated that, but that kid, we have him out at left tackle now, and I mean, Bill, you had him as an All-Pro guard, and now he’s out there at left tackle, and he doesn’t say a word about it,” Reid said with a laugh. “He doesn’t complain, and that’s a whole different world out there. There’s no security blanket when you’re on that side there on your outside. That’s a tough spot, but he just steps in and goes and never blinks on it.”

As the NFL’s dynasty of the decade, the Chiefs have crossed over into pop culture relevance.

Aside from Mahomes chasing Brady, they have star tackle Chris Jones anchoring a young defense and tight end Travis Kelce not only serving as Mahomes’ security blanket in the passing game but bringing a whole new set of eyes to the team with his dating pop music icon Taylor Swift.

“It’s perfect for Joseph because his sort of way of dealing with things is more under the radar,” Mike Thuney said. “So let all the cameras and all the reporters and all that stuff go to Patrick and Travis and Chris and all that. That just works out perfectly for Joseph because he’s not as interested in that stuff, and he’s just kind of like, put my head down and do my job. So I think it’s really kind of a great situation for him, where all the attention is not turned to him. I mean, he, in our minds, is a superstar in his position, but he just doesn’t have to deal with all the things that go along with with that fame.”

Thuney, who earned his second first-team All-Pro selection and fourth Pro Bowl nod this season, is a superstar to those back at Alter High School, though.

Thuney might have left Kettering as a two-star prospect in 2011, but Alter head coach Ed Domsitz said people know him there as a member of the Knights hall of fame and an example of what is possible with hard work and dedication to the craft.

“I don’t think there’s any question,” Domsitz said. “We talk about Joe, and it’s a story that he just worked to improve himself as a player, not just here at Alter, but he really made a big jump at North Carolina State. He was not a blue chip recruit, but it takes brains, it takes work ethic. It takes athletic ability — all those different things.”

Nationally, there might be a narrative neither Super Bowl team is popular among football fans, but Domsitz said that is not the case at Alter.

“You see some 62 (jerseys) occasionally, and this is a number of years after he left Alter, so they watched him,” Domsitz said. “I mean, we were New England fans for a few years when he was there, and we’re Chiefs fans now.

“I grew up being a Browns fan, but some kids in my class asked the other day whether I was rooting for Philadelphia or Kansas City? I said it’s a no-brainer. We got Joe Thuney playing at Kansas City, so we’re backin’ the Chiefs.”