Are the Super Bowl champions good? Is the NFL’s best quarterback still the best? Is one of the league’s only two remaining undefeated teams a contender? Strange questions, and strange times for the Kansas City Chiefs. More of which are to come.
Andy Reid’s back-to-back defending champions are a perfect 4-0 to start the season in their mission to achieve the impossible by becoming the first team ever to win three successive Super Bowls. And yet, something doesn’t sit right.
They have toppled a Baltimore Ravens team that torched $60m-a-year man Dak Prescott’s Dallas Cowboys and MVP-contending Josh Allen’s Buffalo Bills, they fended off Joe Burrow’s always-dangerous Cincinnati Bengals, they extinguished the Atlanta Falcons and their Kirk Cousins-enthused Championship ambitions, and just overcame a 10-point deficit and injury to their star weapon to frustrate Justin Herbert’s Los Angeles Chargers.
It leaves them riding a 10-game winning streak dating back to last season (including the playoffs), across which they have amassed a +61 point differential – marking the slimmest margin of victory in a 10-game winning run in NFL history. The Chiefs have now also won seven straight games by seven or fewer points, tied-longest of such a streak in history with the 2020 Chiefs and 1996 Jacksonville Jaguars.
For all the Patriots-esque inevitability they have mustered as close-game assassins, a storm is on the horizon. If they are to clinch a landmark third in a row, it will go down as their most impressive yet. (Yes, we also said that last year!).
At the heart of the Chiefs’ dynasty success has been continued evolution. Mahomes and Reid were forced to reign in the deep-ball explosives as defensive coordinators retreated into drop-two coverages and challenged them to build patient drives with short throws underneath and through the running game. Check. The script then needed to be flipped as Steve Spagnuolo’s defense, dolled up in layer-upon-layer of disguise, emerged as THE focal point of a Chiefs team previously driven by its red arrow attack on the way to yet another Super Bowl crown. Check.
The 2024 season has displayed a resumption of the latter, to an even greater extent, as Spagnuolo’s unit persists to muddy the field with rotating coverages and personnel alternations to their defensive front as the tempo-dictating heartbeat of the champions. But how much longer can they compensate for a stuttering Chiefs offense?
Reid’s attack is off to its worst start in EPA/play (rbsdm’s advanced metric for down-to-down efficiency) and dropback EPA through four weeks since Patrick Mahomes took over as full-time starter in 2018, as well as posting their second-worst success rate behind only last season. The Chiefs are ranked 14th in total yards, 11th in passing, 15th in rushing and 14th in scoring, while having the tied-third worst turnover differential in the league and passing the ball on just 53.6 per cent of plays (lowest in the Mahomes era).
Mahomes himself is off to his worst start from an efficiency standpoint through four weeks, posting career lows in EPA+CPOE composite (Expected Points Added combined with Completion Percentage Over Expected), EPA/play, yards per game, touchdown-interception ratio and passer rating. He also ranks dead last in the league in average depth of target at 5.4 yards, a reflection of what the Chiefs have become.
Granted, they are not the only offense stumbling through the opening month, with passing yards significantly down on average across the league.
It feels unnatural to be concerned about a team that sits 4-0. Perhaps ‘concerned’ is premature; they still have the NFL’s greatest leveller in Mahomes, and two wizards in Reid and Spagnuolo, and one of the great clutch trench grenades in Chris Jones. But the Chiefs are about to face a torrent of adversity in their bid to wreck the league’s desired parity with another Lombardi lift.
They took another sledgehammer to the knees on Sunday when Rashee Rice suffered what is likely to be a season-ending knee injury, ironically coming as the result of Mahomes accidentally diving into his star receiver after throwing an interception – his fifth on the year, by the way. Turnovers are a problem.
Rice had owned the second-largest target share among receivers in the NFL after asserting himself as Mahomes’ most trusted pass-catcher following a 2023 campaign in which the Chiefs’ understaffed armoury was marred by drops and miscues. He leads the team with 24 receptions from 29 targets for 288 yards and two touchdowns, while ranking third in the league in yards-after-catch and tied fourth in first downs as Reid’s best chain-mover.
Here was their near-automatic soft-spot feaster underneath, serving as Reid’s primary motion man and the chief beneficiary to space-creating route concepts, the idea being that his short yardage gains and defense-stretching crossers would serve as the perfect tee-up to a fun year of dunking downfield to 40-yard dash record holder Xavier Worthy, who provided rare deep-shot success for the Chiefs on Sunday with a 54-yard touchdown catch. Suddenly, Worthy’s route tree is about to be put under the microscope earlier than anticipated, with the Chiefs having already also lost offseason addition Hollywood Brown for the year.
“On the offensive side of the ball, we’ve got to get rolling, man,” said Travis Kelce on the latest episode of his podcast New Heights. “And it’s not going to be any easier seeing Rashee (Rice) go down during the game. I just love the way that guy was playing the game of football, how he was attacking every single day in practice.
“Sometimes you just root so hard for the guys that do it the right way, and Rashee had been doing that, man. It was a huge dagger to me when I saw him go down.”
While others pondered Kelce’s quiet start to the campaign, the Chiefs were reassured in knowing it was not only down to more committed coverage on their tight end but the leading production of Rice. Suddenly, their 34-year-old (soon to be 35) Hall of Fame-bound tight end is back at centre stage, and staring at the prospect of the kind of prominent workload from which few players of his age in his position have offered a defining impact over the years. With that said, he is not your normal tight end, nor is he your normal competitor.
Kelce answered the call on Sunday with a season-high seven catches for 89 yards against the Chargers. But can he still churn out another 1,000-yard campaign? It is a tall order in such a wear-and-tear position.
Within the Chiefs’ evolution has been an improved running game behind one of the league’s most efficient interior blocking systems, Isiah Pacheco playing an instrumental role in 2023 with 205 carries for 935 yards and seven touchdowns followed by 313 yards and three scores in the postseason. He remains sidelined on injured reserve after sustaining a fractured fibula in Week Two, prompting the Chiefs to re-sign Kareem Hunt while turning to veteran Samaje Perine and undrafted rookie Carson Steele, who is averaging just 3.8 yards per carry.
Remove Mahomes from the equation, and few would hold much Super Bowl hope for an offense consisting of untested rookie Worthy, Justin Watson, JuJu Smith-Schuster, an unfavoured Skyy Moore, Mecole Hardman and a Perine-Steele-Hunt committee backfield.
“We’ve got guys here that have experience of playing in the game,” said Reid. “It’s not that he’s (Rice) the only one. He doesn’t have to be the only one. We’ve got a good group of guys there that we can utilise. We normally spread the ball around, and that’s what we’ll continue to strive to do.”
Inevitably, the Chiefs have emerged as potential candidates to make a splash before the league’s November 5 trade deadline, particularly in light of the apparent availability of Las Vegas Raiders wide receiver Davante Adams, whose contract could, admittedly, price Brett Veach out of a move. Elsewhere, Amari Cooper seems a feasible option as the Cleveland Browns slump behind Deshaun Watson, as does a 32-year-old DeAndre Hopkins amid Tennessee’s struggles on offense and uncertainty at quarterback. But this is a Chiefs offense that thrives on familiarity and receivers building a rapport with Mahomes.
Their perfect start has been anything but perfect, and daunting obstacles await in the New Orleans Saints, San Francisco 49ers and Bills within the next six weeks.
And yet there is an ominous backs-against-the-wall notion to it all. Reid, Mahomes, Kelce, Spags and Jones are at the spine of an unlikely bid to do the unthinkable. They hobbled through much of last season on offense, piggybacking off the Spags machine before proving modern masters of playoff football. They shouldn’t have been able to win it all, and they did.
They embody the ‘find a way to win’ cliche attached to perennial champions. Nothing is ever ‘quite against the odds’ for them. But is this a step too far?