KC Chiefs Aren’t Fooling Anyone Down the Stretch This Season
No matter the result, there is always something to learn from a week of Kansas City Chiefs football. Similar to outcomes of past games, Week 14 showed the world that Andy Reid's team is growing quite consistent in how it operates. It further confirmed what we already knew.
Unfortunately for Kansas City, that brand of play indicates that while the team is capable of hanging with some of the NFL's most talented opponents, it also has enough flaws to come up just short.
Dating back to a Week 8 loss to the Denver Broncos on Oct. 29, this is a 2-4 ball club that has been right in the thick of three of those losses. It's easy to spin-zone these games and say that the Chiefs are a few plays from having a better record. But when a Reid and Patrick Mahomes-led team (with a still-great Travis Kelce also in the fold) lacks final counterpunches and a clutch gene, it's a shame. That team can only live on the historical advantage of having multiple Hall of Fame talents for so long. At a certain point, a team is what it is.
Two weeks before Christmas, this year's Chiefs team isn't a chameleon or a starfish. It can't adapt to its environment easily and it rarely grows appendages back after shooting them off. In-game responses against the Las Vegas Raiders, Green Bay Packers and the Buffalo Bills on Sunday show that there's at least some level of fire. Sure. With that said, the margin for error remains incredibly slim and the probability of those comebacks being completed is lower now than it has been since 2018 when Mahomes took over at quarterback.
In Kansas City's losses (and in some of its wins), what have the backbreakers been? A combination of penalties, turnovers, drops and/or a lack of attention to detail on routes at wide receiver. Early in the season, those mistakes were excusable. During a six-game winning streak after a Week 1 loss, they were overlooked. Time was still on the Chiefs' side, and they were still winning games despite sometimes trying their best to make things interesting. Now, though, there's no choice but to call the Chiefs what they are: in the mix. It's something that became apparent last week. Those backbreakers are the same as they were in September.
Perhaps the worst part for the Chiefs is that their last four games — at the New England Patriots, home against the Las Vegas Raiders and Cincinnati Bengals, on the road versus the Los Angeles Chargers — don't provide true and thorough opportunities to show change. Three of those franchises have losing records and the only winning one is a team operating with a backup quarterback. Kansas City is objectively better than all of them, even amid this stretch, so why would simply doing what they're supposed to do change anyone's mind as the playoffs approach?
Then again, simply doing what they're supposed to do would eliminate a good chunk of the Chiefs' problems. Again, regardless of the final score, there is something to be taken away from each game. That still applies over the next month of play. But if you think you see a breakthrough, tread lightly. The Chiefs' formula for winning remains the same: limit self-inflicted mistakes, scrape by on offense and rely on a great defense to get the job done. Teams have won big with those processes before, although it amplifies the magnitude of each mistake committed.
The difficult part of Kansas City's schedule revealed its true colors. The finish can portray whatever it chooses but when the chips are down in mid-January, there's a pretty significant bank of recent history to go to. In playoff-caliber games, the Chiefs are a playoff-caliber team. That's all they've shown to be, however, which appears to be a step back from past squads of the Mahomes era. The championship DNA for this specific group is either in hiding or doesn't exist, and even a strong end to the regular season shouldn't fool anyone.
