2024 Chiefs: The NEW Luckiest Team in NFL History

It's finally time to have a long talk about the 2024 Kansas City Chiefs, and what kind of football team they were.

Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project, where this post may start a firestorm, if I’m lucky.

I’ve made a pledge with my readers. I don’t talk about the present in the longform posts, unless something I find interesting happens. In the 2024 NFL season, this has resulted in me talking about the present just twice, once talking about how the Falcons tanking themselves out of the playoff race infuriated me, and once after week one, decrying that the league willingly uses bad players more than they ever used to.

I haven’t written a post about being good at football in the present since I wrote about Jordan Love in the 2023 playoffs, well over a year ago now. It’s typically just not what I do. I wait for good football to age a little bit, to allow more aspects of the story to become public knowledge, and then I’ll write about it. However, to talk about the 2024 Chiefs, their play on the field is all I need.

Did you know the KC Chiefs won 15 games in the 2024 season?

I know. With everybody talking about how much they’d fallen off for most of the season, it became quite easy to forget that they were still winning the games.

This constant focus on the negative, regardless of the actual results of the games, reminds me a lot of another team from recent history, the 2022 Minnesota Vikings, about whom I wrote another article, with the exact same title as this one, calling them the luckiest team in NFL history. That title was correct when I wrote it, but it’s not correct anymore. Their throne has been stolen. Their crown is now being worn by the 2024 KC Chiefs.

In the play tracking era, there have been just 16 teams to end a season with two losses or fewer. There are better and worse teams within this lofty group, but the 2024 Chiefs are by far the worst of them all, and I’m going to prove it to you.

Normally, to be a great team in the NFL, you have to be great at something. There are no parameters on what that thing has to be. You can be great at defence. You can be great at offence. You can be great at passing. You can be great at running, but there has to be something that you’re great at.

In addition, you have to be good at everything. In the NFL, there are six measurements for (non-special teams) play. Pass, rush and total offence, as well as pass, rush, and total defence. The rule of thumb to be a great team is that you have to be top ten in at least four of these categories, in addition to being top five in some of them. The more the better, but you can get away with four. Basically, this means that a great team has (at least) to be fantastic on offence, and have something to hang their hat on on the defensive side, or vice versa.

The 2024 Baltimore Ravens are a team that comes to mind. They are unequivocally a great team, but are in the top ten of only four of these six categories, being neither a top ten pass nor total defence. This is a team that won games based on their extraordinary offence, while at least having rush defence as something on that side to feel good about. They make up for the low amount of total categories by being in the top five in all of them, measured by EPA/Play.

So, who wants to take a guess as to how many categories in which the Chiefs finished in the top ten?

Three.

Rush defence, as well as pass and total offence.

These are not strong top tens either. It’s tenth in rush defence, ninth in total offence, and tenth in passing offence. The 2024 Chiefs are top five in nothing. They are great at nothing. This on its own means this team fails the smell test to me. They’re just not good at enough things, but let me show you how they stack up compared to everybody else who got as many wins as they did.

Here is every team that achieved two or fewer losses in a season in the last 25 years while finishing top five in no categories:

Only the 2024 Chiefs.

Here is every team that finished with two or fewer losses in a season in the last 25 years with a total defence ranking as bad as the 2024 Chiefs’ 15th place:

2010 Patriots, 2011 Packers, 2020 Chiefs, 2024 Chiefs.

At least we’ve picked up some company this time, but we’ve picked up company in the form of teams that have 2010 Tom Brady, 2011 Aaron Rodgers, and 2020 Patrick Mahomes, against all of whom 2024 Patrick Mahomes is not just outmatched but entirely hopeless. On the notion of offence, here is every team that’s finished with two or fewer losses in a season in the last 25 years with a total offence ranking as bad as the 2024 Chiefs' 9th place:

2003 Patriots, 2024 Chiefs.

What I’m getting at is you can still be this calibre of team allowing an elite offence to make up for a not 15-win-calibre defence. You can do it while allowing an elite defence to make up for an offence that is not 15-win-calibre. You cannot do it without an elite anything, but that is exactly what the Chiefs have just pulled off in 2024.

If I didn’t tell you what laundry the team was wearing, and I told you that a team with the league’s 15th ranked total offence, and ninth ranked total defence, just won 15 games in a season, you would say that’s impossible. There’s only so many points to go around. You cannot give up so many, score so few, and still have enough left over to have 15 different margins of victory. 385 points allowed subtract 326 points allowed is just 59 points to use to spread across every victory for an entire season. If we have to win 15 games, that’s an average of 3.93 points per victory.

That’s not possible.

Take for instance the 2024 Green Bay Packers, who I consider to be a standard 11 win football team. They had 122 points over their opponents, and spread them over 11 victories, for an average margin of victory of 11.1 points in the games they won. That’s slightly higher than average for an 11 win team, but not entirely atypical.

How in the world did the KC Chiefs manage to pull off a 15 win season, while barely even being able to outscore their opponents?

The answer is simple. One possession games.

One possession games are what these Chiefs did well. They are what they hung their hat on. One possession games are what they enjoyed doing. They are all these Chiefs had going for them. This is not a compliment by the way. One possession games are a bad thing. They allow your opponent close enough to be able to have luck swing the game their way, in a game where luck has a lot of power to swing things.

‘He’s great in one possession games’ is the type of backhanded compliment normally reserved for the likes of Kirk Cousins. It’s not supposed to be used when discussing the two time defending champions, but it is, and I’m going to use another list to tell you why.

Here is every team that achieved two or fewer losses in a season in the last 25 years that had to play 11 one possession games:

2024 Chiefs.

Alright. That’s embarrassing. How about ten games then? Surely with a bonus, some team has to join this list:

2024 Chiefs.

For goodness’ sake. Surely the 2024 Chiefs can’t be the only team that relied on a bit of one possession game luck to get to these lofty heights. How about nine games then?

2024 Lions, 2024 Chiefs.

It’s not until you get to eight one possession games in a season where you find quite a few companions in the two or less loss club. Those are the teams that got to the top with one possession game luck. The ones who played eight one possession games. Kansas City blows that out of the water with their 11. That does not just make what the Chiefs have done unprecedented. It also justifies the title. This is the luckiest team in NFL history.

The last time I talked about something like this, I talked about how the 2022 Vikings played 11 one possession games, and won all of them. I thought it would never be done again, but it’s taken just two seasons for that number to not just be matched, but one-upped.

Allow me to tell you the story of the greatest run of luck in NFL history, the 2024 Kansas City Chiefs.

At season’s beginning, it did not seem like it was going to be this way. Week one is a matchup between our KC Chiefs and the AFC’s best team in 2023 (and 2024, as it would turn out), the Baltimore Ravens, and it’s moments like these where I must insist that not every one possession game is the same. We beat the Ravens 27-20, and got within an eyelash of having to go to OT, but this is the acceptable brand of close game.

We spent almost the entire second half leading by multiple possessions, and the lowest our estimated Win Probability (according to NFLFastR) ever got in the second half was 67 percent. There was never any real danger of losing. We spent the whole second half far enough ahead that there was nothing luck could do to swing the tide of this battle. It tried. A lot of things went against us in the last ten minutes for this game to even be as close as it was, but the benefit of having a big lead is the privilege to squander most of it.

As is turns out, squandering leads is going to become a theme of this piece. Remember this Baltimore game for later, as from the future, we can see that coming within a toe’s width of blowing a two possession lead to Baltimore is not an isolated incident, but the beginning of the 2024 KC Chiefs forming the identity that they will carry with them the entire season. It’s not terribly important right now, but will become that way in retrospect, as the first of many blown leads for the 2024 Kansas City Chiefs.

In week one though, we don’t know that yet. All we know is we’ve just scored an impressive win over what is going to be one of the best teams in the conference again. That takes us to 1-0, and we move on to week two, where once again we get one of the AFC’s top dogs.

So we thought.

Week two is actually against the Cincinnati Bengals, a team who is going to boast one of the worst defences in all of football in 2024, and hadn’t been very good in 2023 either. This poor defence, combined with the game taking place in Kansas City, means we go into this game as full touchdown favourites, but as we’re soon to see, these Chiefs ought not to be favoured by so much.

This is a game that should’ve been a passing showcase, pitting the league’s 15th (KC) and 16th (CIN) ranked pass defences against one another, with both given the task to try to shut down one of the league’s best QBs, but as will become common in 2024 Chiefs games, the impossible occurs. Both teams have no trouble at all shutting down such elite opposition, even without the necessary defensive talent to do so.

It’s actually the KC rush offence that has to carry the day, operating at a 57 percent success rate (compared to Patrick Mahomes’ 38%). Despite this very solid day out of the rush offence, it’s just hard to win with your QB playing so badly, so we go into half behind 16-10, encountering our first of many second half deficits of the 2024 season.

It doesn’t last long, as the rush and the pass game split the load evenly (five successful plays each) en route to taking a 17-16 lead on the first drive of the second half, but this is where the offence sinks into the malaise. The Bengals immediately take a 22-17 lead back, and we cannot respond. Patrick Mahomes throws two INTs on the next drive. Only one of them is called back by a penalty, and that’s where we find the Chiefs’ lowest chance to win this game according to NFLFastR. 32 percent, with the Bengals possessing the ball, with a five point lead, on the first play of the fourth quarter.

Things will never get this good for Cincinnati again, as our defence comes up clutch, returning a strip sack for a TD and a 23-22 lead. They do take a 25-23 lead back, as we can’t find a single positive offensive play on our next drive either, and when Cincinnati possesses the ball on first and ten with seven minutes left and a two point lead, it’s beginning to look seriously bleak again.

Thankfully, we’re able to find a sack on Joe Burrow in the key moment, giving us the ball back for the final time, as while we’re still able to find just four successful offensive plays, that’s enough to get us into FG range, and we win this game 26-25.

That was a brutal second half of offence, and when I say brutal, I mean after the good looking drive to make it 17-16, there was not a single offensive play that generated positive EPA until the FG drive at the end, and even that drive featured just four of them on nine tries. This makes the Chiefs one of only six teams held to negative EPA by the Cincinnati Bengals all season, joining the inauspicious company of the New York Giants, Cleveland Browns (2x), Las Vegas Raiders, Tennessee Titans, and Pittsburgh Steelers.

Offensively, being compared to any of those teams is a nightmare, but it’s where the Chiefs belong in week two. Whatever the opposite of clutch is, that’s the adjective that describes our offence this game. We relied heavily on our defence, and they were there to pick up the slack, making us one of only five teams to hold the high flying Bengals to less than 0.05 EPA/Play (the vicinity of zero) all season, joining the Patriots, Giants, Browns, and Steelers.

Out of a defence that’s going to finish the season ranked 15th against the pass, it would not be wise to rely on them for this kind of performance again, but I don’t think the Chiefs get that memo, because a very similar thing happens the very next week, on the road in Atlanta.

We enter the second half trailing 14-13, struggling mightily to score against an Atlanta Falcon team that’s going to finish the season ranked 20th in total defence. Not that much better than Cincinnati. Just like against Cincinnati, we come out of the half hot, scoring two quick ones to make the score 22-14, scoring our last touchdown at 1:21 remaining in the third quarter.

Again like Cincinnati, our offence suddenly, and without warning, turns from white hot to ice cold. For the final 16:21 of the game, there are two successful offensive plays in total, and not a single first down, giving Kirk Cousins not one, not two, but three chances to eliminate our one possession lead. He’s normally great at this kind of thing, but not today.

We do reach our lowest second half estimated Win Probability of 56 percent, with Kirk Cousins possessing the ball on our six yard line behind by five points at 5:32 of the fourth, but he can get no further, turning the ball over on downs, and not getting that close a second time. By the skin of the teeth, our defence has bailed out our frozen fourth quarter offence for the second week in a row, and we move to 3-0.

In retrospect, week four is a very important game for us. It’s on the road against the division rival Los Angeles Chargers, who are a team that everybody loves to laugh at, but a team we would find out over the 2024 season is not one you want to surrender the division lead to. They’re not to be taken lightly.

Their defence is not a pushover like Cincinnati or Atlanta. They’re going to finish fifth in EPA/Play Allowed this season. It doesn’t seem like the optimal opponent to get our poor second half offence turned around, but in this case, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to have to worry about the second half.

Our first half offence is even worse.

We fall behind 10-0 in the second quarter, as prior to the 54 yard TD pass to Xavier Worthy at 4:14, there had been eight total successful offensive plays in the whole first half, on 21 tries. A 38.1 percent first half success rate is not acceptable, as even though the Chargers were awful on offence in the early season, they’re better than this. We can’t manage anything after this 54 yard touchdown pass either, so we go into the second half trailing for the third week in a row, this time 10-7, with all of our offence for the entire game having come on one play.

We know how this game finishes, but pretend you don’t. This is an iffy spot. With the benefit of hindsight, the Chargers are a pretty good team, and the AFC West is a pretty good division in 2024. It’s not like the AFC West that the Chiefs have known for most of the last decade, where a divisional loss or two is okay here and there. Divisional losses are not something we can afford to take in 2024.

Knowing how our offence came up so small in the key moments against such innocuous defences as Cincinnati and Atlanta, what can we possibly expect them to do against the mighty Los Angeles Chargers? It’s got to be better than its been in this next half, elsewise we’re going to fall to second place in the AFC West for the first time in years.

It does not start well, having to rely on a missed Charger FG to keep the score 10-7 by the time we touch the ball, and beginning the half with one successful play (a third down bailout) in five tries to bring our offence to bleak looking third and 11 situation.

On this third and 11, Patrick throws a very nice ball deep down the middle to Justin Watson. Nothing else comes of this drive, but this play on its own is enough to ensure a FG, and a game tied at ten. The Chargers get to our three yard line but turn the ball over on downs. We can’t do anything either, but LA has nothing for this voracious fourth quarter defence. They don’t get anywhere near scoring, as we engineer our first legitimately good looking fourth quarter drive of the season to sneak out of Los Angeles with a 17-10 win.

When I began the writing process on this article, I expected a lot of Patrick Mahomes fourth quarter wizardry. Instead, I’m faced with a pass offence that has a 50% success rate on the dot in the fourth quarter through the last three weeks, almost all of which comes in this Los Angeles game. There’s nothing wrong with 50%. In fact, that’s what strikes me about it. How ordinary it is.

The 2024 Chiefs are going to be a 50% success rate pass offence all season, in all situations. They do not improve in the fourth quarter. At least they haven’t yet.

Taking into account the Chiefs’ lowest second half estimated WP in all these games (67 percent against Baltimore, 32 percent against Cincinnati, 56 percent against Atlanta, 46 percent against Los Angeles before they missed the FG), that leaves an average of 50.25%, meaning the Chiefs should have likely won exactly half of these games, a typical result when all four of them were decided by one possession. Instead, we’ve won all four.

I’m off to a great start in proving the titular hypothesis.

What doesn’t help prove my hypothesis is the next two games, where the Chiefs defeat a Saints team that was off to an extremely hot start by the score of 26-13, and defeat the sinking but not yet sunk SF 49ers on the road by a score of 28-18. Both of these were fantastic performances out of our second half offence to turn what would’ve been dodgy games in weeks 2-4 into multi-possession wins in weeks 5-7. This was a very impressive stretch. If only this team could’ve had more games like this, there would’ve been no article with this title.

Another game that belongs to this good stretch in spirit is week eight on the road in Las Vegas. This is the right type of one possession game again. In the end, it’s decided by the score of 27-20, but there is no second half deficit. Gardner Minshew does not get three different chances to tie the game like Kirk Cousins got. He gets one, which ends in two plays when he gets strip sacked, and the game is over from there. The Chiefs’ estimated WP never gets lower than 66 percent in the second half.

These are the type of games that Chiefs fans love to talk about, which is why I’m getting so granular about which types of one possession games are flukes, and which are not. So far, there have been five of them. Baltimore and Las Vegas were well under control for almost their whole duration. Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Los Angeles legitimately could’ve gone either way. I generally say that teams should win approximately 50 percent of their one possession games, but this is only an aggregate, like I aggregated it to 50.25% earlier. Not every game is a 50/50 if the score is eight points or narrower. Those are just the bad ones, and for week nine, on Monday Night Football against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, we have to step back into the realm of the bad one possession games.

Both offences struggle to score for the first half, moving us past the halftime break with the score 10-7 in favour of Kansas City. However, Tampa makes mincemeat of our second half KC defence, immediately moving the score to 14-10, and giving us yet another second half deficit to deal with.

This is our fourth second half deficit of the season, which may not seem like much, but for a team undefeated through seven games this is a ridiculous number. Teams who finish seasons with two losses or fewer are known to finish whole seasons with four or fewer second half deficits. This is just game eight, and we’re already on our fourth one.

Our offence did not come out of the locker room as hot as the Bucs’ did, so we go three and out, punting the ball back to Tampa Bay. Our defence is struggling with their top five offence. The first play of their new drive immediately gets them to our 41 yard line. The defence does force them into a third and 12 from this position, but a 15 yard catch and run to Cade Otton really hurts, giving the Bucs first and ten from the 20 yard line, and ultimately the lowest chance of winning the Chiefs will face all night long, 40 percent.

Luckily, first down is an offensive facemask penalty, pushing Tampa all the way back to first and 25 at the 43. They do still manage a FG out of this, but disaster is averted. They will not find a spot that good again, as our offence finally wakes up, scoring back to back touchdowns to make the score 24-17 to our benefit. When Tampa again cannot score, that means we have the ball leading by seven points at 2:39 of the fourth quarter.

NFLFastR gives us a 96 percent chance to win from this position, as even if Tampa Bay gets the ball back, they will have no timeouts, and will have to go the length of the field against our defence, who is not easy to go down the field against in these fourth quarter moments. Even while the second half offence has let us down a few times this season already, the late game defence never has, and so right now, when the late game offence lets us down again, running only three offensive plays and giving the ball back to the Bucs, I’m still not that scared.

When the first play of the Tampa offensive touch is an offensive holding penalty, I’m really not scared. The Bucs get rolling from there though, but even when they get to first and ten on the 23, I’m still not scared. Our defence has faced this situation three times already in clutch situations, and we’ve lived to tell about it.

It’s only once I physically see the ball enter the end zone, and see the score board switch to displaying 24-23, that I know we have royally botched this game. It’s an even bigger insult when the Bucs elect to kick to make the score 24-24 instead of going for two points and the win, indicating that they believe they can beat us in an OT. You can’t fault their confidence, but in this instance it turns out to be a mistake.

A bad mistake.

This game goes into OT tied at 24. We win the coin toss, and Baker Mayfield never touches the ball again. Tampa fans are extremely unhappy about the choice to allow this game to go to OT instead of considering a two point try, as the Chiefs once again get out of Dodge, this time with a razor thin 30-24 overtime victory.

Royally botching an almost certain victory is not a flavour of one possession game we’ve seen out of these Chiefs prior to this, but we’ve seen it now, and we’re going to keep seeing it as the season rolls along. I told you after Baltimore that blowing leads would become a trend. This is where that trend really gets going. In this case, we were let off the hook by the Buccaneers’ overconfidence, or fear, or perhaps both, preventing them from attempting a two point conversion to attempt to win the game, but make no mistake. Frittering away a 96 percent chance to win and allowing the game to slip into a naked 50/50 overtime coin toss scenario is not what elite teams do.

Everybody has slip ups, but this was a bad slip. Not one becoming of a team with the status of two time defending NFL champions. In isolation, it could’ve been looked over, but combining this with all the other second half deficits the Chiefs have had this season makes this Tampa Bay game the point where all the noise around KC not being an elite team anymore really began to have substance for me. At this point, it’s becoming difficult not to notice that the Chiefs are not what they once were.

For reference, the best version of the Patrick Mahomes Chiefs (2022), played just eight games in a 17 game season where they allowed their opponents to stay within ten total EPA of them. That’s less than half of all games where the Chiefs failed to convincingly defeat their opponents. That is a great football team.

These Chiefs have played eight games so far, and have played seven games already decided by ten total EPA or less. Only in the Saints game (12.27 to -3.67) did the Chiefs truly convincingly defeat their opponents. In all the others, the game was within one big play of going the other way, and speaking of that, we’re about to get to perhaps the ultimate moment that the 2024 Chiefs will be remembered for. As far from a convincing win as one can get.

By the time week ten comes around, the Chiefs are not free and clear already, but we’re close. Three games ahead of the LA Chargers, and four ahead of Denver, we’re at the point now where we can afford one loss, so each game means a little bit less than it did just a few weeks ago, but each team always wants to defeat their division rivals, so this game against the hot new thing going on in Denver is a game both sides really want.

We come into it as eight point home favourites, but the bookies don’t know that the Denver Broncos are all set to get white hot after this. The Broncos will win each of their next four games after this one, not a single one by one possession, to truly break out of the pack and cement themselves as a team that will be making the playoffs in the AFC. They aren’t there yet as of week ten, but with how they play against us right now, perhaps we could’ve seen it coming.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Both offences struggle mightily throughout the bulk of the game, with Denver’s reluctance to throw their rookie QB into the Kansas City fire holding them back, and Denver’s number one defence holding us back. We manage two successful offensive plays in the first quarter, meanwhile the Broncos score on the second play of the second to take a 7-0 lead. We narrow the score to 7-3, but they immediately bomb a big completion on us to make it a 14-3 deficit.

We are able to narrow the score to 14-10 come halftime, but this is yet another second half deficit the 2024 KC Chiefs have to contend with. Beginning the half with a three and out does not help, nor does only being able to convert a first and goal opportunity into a FG and a 14-13 deficit. It’s once again that late game Chief defence holding down the fort, as despite scoring just six offensive points in the second half, not the type of performance you’d like when facing a four point halftime deficit, the Chiefs do have a 16-14 lead when the Broncos touch the ball for their final time, on account of our defence holding them to just three successful offensive plays in the entire half so far.

Much like the Tampa game last week, this does not feel like an especially dangerous situation. There’s six minutes left. Even if Denver does score, we can still get the ball back afterwards, and that’s if they can move the ball at all against this defence who has surrendered just two first downs in the whole second half.

Nevertheless, the Denver offence starts crawling down the field. Two yard run, six yard pass, six yard run, three yard pass, etc.. It’s the type of drive that’s awful in the first quarter, but fantastic in the fourth quarter. Our defence has three different chances to get them off the field on third down, but cannot convert any of them, and with the Broncos making sure to run the full 40 seconds off the clock at each opportunity, the final failure leaves us with our lowest chance of winning this game, 27 percent, with the Broncos possessing the ball on our 14, with enough downs remaining to run the clock down to zeroes.

It seems as if, for the second week in a row, the late game defence that’d been our calling card all season has failed us. Our chances of winning this game have been reduced to the chances of Wil Lutz missing this 35 yard FG attempt. There is no more time remaining for any kind of response. We have surrendered control of our destiny. All that can be done to continue our perfect season is to hope for a missed FG, something we have no control over.

Oh come on. You really believed that?

Being the team that we are, the 2024 Chiefs exercise the very last bit of control we have remaining. We block the FG attempt, converting on our 27 percent chance of victory, delaying the beginning of Denver’s hot streak for one week longer, and propelling ourselves to 9-0. This is the eighth game decided by ten total EPA or less (5.4 to 3.45), officially using as many close calls as the 2022 Chiefs used in their whole Super Bowl campaign, in just nine games.

We’re about to reach an inflection point in this 2024 Chiefs campaign, so I’m going to take this chance to summarise what happened in the undefeated portion of our season.

In the first ten weeks (nine games) of the 2024 NFL season, the Kansas City Chiefs faced five second half deficits, plus two additional games also decided by one possession, but never featuring the Chiefs trailing.

Taking the average of the second half win probabilities again, using the 67, 32, 56, 46, from before, in addition to the 66 percent from Las Vegas, 40 percent from Tampa, and 27 percent from Denver means I would expect the Chiefs to win 47.7 percent of these one possession games. If I give this team full credit for the two multi-possession wins, that’s still just 5.34 expected wins, which the Chiefs have turned into nine real ones.

That’s 3.66 wins above expected in just half a season.

The lion’s share of work towards becoming the luckiest team ever has already been done. For context, only three teams in the new millennium (2012 Colts, 2016 Raiders, and of course the 2022 Vikings) have scored 3.66 wins above expected or more in a whole season, according to my expected win model, so through just nine games this is already one of the luckiest NFL teams ever, and it’s still not over yet.

Before we get to the rest of it though, we have to talk about week 11 in Buffalo.

On the surface, it looks a lot like every other game these Chiefs have played all season, coming out of halftime facing a 16-14 deficit, but the Bills are different. They are not the Chargers. They are not the Falcons. They are not the Buccaneers. You cannot pull a Houdini act like the Chiefs have been pulling all season on them.

There are chances we get to swing this game, but we do not just fail on them. We miserably fail on them, not even getting close to scoring until we are already down two possessions, and it is too late. This is where the 2024 Chiefs and the 2022 Vikings (their closest comparison) differ. The 2022 Vikings never failed in any clutch spots all season long, but they were not good enough to stand up to the top teams, so the true top dogs just beat them in 40-10 type games, and did not have to worry about any of their clutch nonsense.

You cannot do that to these Chiefs. We’re too good for that, but we’re also not as clutch as the 2022 Vikings. The 2022 Vikings would’ve won this game 100 percent of the time. They basically did. They won one exactly like it against the Buffalo Bills in their season, but the Chiefs did not win it. We did not get close to winning it.

It’s a slap in the face of a realisation that we’re not ready for the top teams anymore. We can beat teams like the Falcons and Chargers this way, but when it comes to the Bills it’s just too much. Thankfully, we won’t have to face a true top team again for a while. Let’s get back to the fun stuff, like a week 12 matchup against the Carolina Panthers.

I don’t bet sports anymore, but when I saw the line was the Chiefs by 11, I audibly laughed and told all of my friends to go bet the Panthers to cover, and not to bet small. We do not beat anybody by 11 points. Not even the Panthers.

For most of this game, it doesn’t look too dangerous for KC. Far from a second half deficit, we enter the second half of this game with a 20-9 lead. It’s the good type of one possession game again. Carolina narrows it to 20-16, we pull back out to 27-16. At the beginning of the fourth quarter, they narrow it again to 27-19, and true to form, our offence goes to sleep.

In two tries to put the game away, we do not score. This leaves the Carolina Panthers to drive down the field and tie the game at 27 with 1:49 to go. This gets us to our lowest second half win probability, 75 percent. This seems low for a tied game in the fourth, but with the worst thing that can possibly happen being a 50/50 overtime, it’s not that unreasonable. We don’t get that far anyways, as a 33 yard Mahomes scramble is enough on its own to get us into FG range, and we take this one 30-27, but seriously?

A last second FG against the Carolina Panthers? What are we doing here?

It’s one thing not being able to convincingly defeat teams like the Chargers and Falcons. Also, in an underrated point, it can’t be denied that even though we were getting really lucky to win all those games, the average game on our schedule for the first nine was against a 9.18 expected win team. That’s a hard schedule. All of that falls away though, now that we’ve failed to convincingly defeat the 3-7 Carolina Panthers. We did not cover our 11 point spread. We couldn’t even cover a three point spread. All of this after falling well short in our game against Buffalo.

Despite the 10-1 record, things are not looking very good for KC, and somehow in week 13, they get even worse. Or should I say, they get even more Chiefs? On a Friday afternoon Thanksgiving weekend home game against the Las Vegas Raiders, everything goes brutally wrong, yet still somehow goes right.

Aidan O’Connell outplays Patrick Mahomes 0.14 EPA/Play to 0.06. We allow one of the worst rushing offences in NFL history in the 2024 Raiders to work at a 46 percent success rate against us. We cannot move the ball ourselves against a bottom half defence again, and we’re clearly the second best team on the field, against the damned Raiders.

It’s not so much this way in the first half, where neither team can move the ball effectively, but a missed Vegas FG helps us into the half with a 10-3 lead instead of a 10-6 one. To open up the second half, the Raiders march right down to our 30 yard line, but then the worst rush offence in recent memory comes back to bite them, and they fail on fourth and one there. We respond with one successful offensive play, but it’s a big one, so on its own it gets us a 13-3 lead.

The Raiders spend their next drive getting to our 22 with very little issue, but missing a FG again. We repeat pattern as well, responding with only one play that generates positive EPA, but it’s a 31 yard pass to DeAndre Hopkins, which nets three points and a 16-3 lead basically on its own. This is one of the most undeserved 13 point leads I’ve ever seen, with the Raiders having been inside the 30 twice, plus two additional FG attempts, all of which have netted three points combined.

This won’t continue.

At last, Vegas converts one of their good offensive drives into a score, cutting the lead to 16-10. We respond with nothing, and things are finally where they should be when a one play touchdown on the first play of the fourth quarter has us staring down the barrel of yet another second half deficit, 17-16.

That is yet another 95+ percent chance of victory that we have frittered away. That’s three of those in the last five games, along with Tampa Bay and Carolina. We can’t just have blowouts. We have to have these fourth quarter wars instead. It’s yet another one that we win, as we spend our three remaining touches on a FG and two three and outs, meanwhile the Raiders get inside our 40 yard line twice more, but again convert neither of these opportunities into any points.

That’s a 19-17 win for us, but this is the definition of unsustainable. Playing against the 2-9 Las Vegas Raiders this way is very very far from the level at which the Chiefs are accustomed to being. We’ve just lost the total EPA battle 4.76 to 2.92, but three missed Raider FGs, plus two Raider turnovers, all inside our 40 yard line, get us out of this never ending nightmare of a football game with a two point victory.

Nobody came up clutch in this game. Certainly not the offence, who scored nine second half points against a Raider team who’d given up 20 second half points to Bo Nix just last week. No offence to Bo Nix, but he shouldn’t be outperforming the KC Chiefs’ offence at anything. The defence didn’t hold up their end either, as the Raiders generated positive EPA just five times all season. Even with all the nonsense inside our 40 yard line, this game is one of them. Las Vegas won the total EPA battle in a game just four times all season. This game is one of them.

This is a level of competition that should not be troubling the KC Chiefs, but they are, because the Chiefs are not what the Chiefs used to be. Sometime between 2022 and now, there has been a structural break, where we went from being one of the NFL’s top dogs to relying on games like this to defeat the Las Vegas Raiders. Nevertheless, we did, and we move to week 14 at 11-1.

By this point, everybody’s gotten the picture with the Chiefs. They know what we are. This is demonstrated by the point spread for week 14’s game at home against Los Angeles. In week four, we traveled across the country to play in their home, and we did it as eight point favourites. Now, we play at home as mere five point favourites. If we net out the approximate three point boost that a home team gets, that’s 11 point favourites in week four, and just two points now.

That’s a nine point difference, against the exact same Los Angeles Chargers. That amounts to a dramatic loss of respect for the KC Chiefs over the course of this season, but with how everything has gone, can you honestly say it’s undeserved? We can barely beat the Carolina Panthers and Las Vegas Raiders. What are we supposed to do against a real team, like Los Angeles?

Well, how about the same thing we’ve been doing all season?

It’s a punt fest for the whole first half. The Chargers never get near scoring. We score 13 points, and going into halftime with a 13-0 lead, it looks just for a second like we’re about to actually beat somebody (as opposed to barely squeaking past them) for once. We’re coming out for the second half with a 93 percent estimated WP. All we have to do is maintain. Although we’ve been faltering for the last few weeks, we’re generally pretty good at maintaining. We don’t have to win another half. We just have to not lose it spectacularly.

These Chiefs are getting into quite the habit of spectacularly blowing leads.

Touchdown Chargers. Three and out. Touchdown Chargers.

Our estimated WP did not get all the way up to 95 percent, but it got up to 94, so I’m changing the filter, so I can say that this is the third week in a row that the Chiefs have allowed a 94 percent chance of victory or higher to become either a second half tie or deficit. All we had to do was coast. Now we’re down 14-13.

When did the Chiefs become such chokers?

I hate using that word, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Kansas City Chiefs or football in general, but I will use it in this circumstance, because what other word do you expect me to use? This is the fourth time in the last six games that this team has taken an almost unlosable situation, and found a way to put ourselves into a losing position.

Thankfully for us, the world at large only cares to notice how big of a choker you are when you actually lose, as the final three drives of this game go FG Chiefs, FG Chargers, FG Chiefs, and we win the game 19-17 again, but good God. This team is going to give me a heart attack if they cannot figure out how to hold on to a lead.

It’s not like these are electric offences either. We allowed the Buccaneers to come back on us. That’s perhaps forgivable, but we had the Carolina Panthers, Las Vegas Raiders, and Los Angeles Chargers all in practically hopeless situations. None of these teams are top ten offences. None of them are close to being top ten offences. Two of them are in fact bottom ten offences.

If we allow a comeback to Baker Mayfield, I will say okay. I’m glad to get the win. Don’t do it again, but if we allow a comeback to Bryce Young, Aidan O’Connell, or Justin Herbert, especially in back to back to back games, I will say there are serious structural issues. For people who thought this was an elite team throughout the season, this is the type of thing people like me were screaming about.

This is a team that can’t get a lead. They can’t hold a lead even when they do get a lead. They play close against good teams. They play close against bad teams. They allow comebacks to good offences. They allow comebacks to bad offences. All of this, but they have just one loss. At this point, week 14 of the 2024 NFL season, I found myself prepared to call this the luckiest team in NFL history.

Think about it.

They are 12-1 yes, but they’ve played ten one possession games, winning all of them, and they don’t seem to discriminate between good and bad competition as to whether they play a one score game or not. Who does that remind you of?

Ding ding. You’re correct. The 2022 Minnesota Vikings. The previous holders of the title of the luckiest football team in NFL history, but even the 2022 Vikings did not make it as hard on themselves as the Chiefs have. One more time averaging out the one possession game luck reveals that the Chiefs should’ve probably won 51.8 percent of these one possession games on average. Giving them no credit for the multi possession loss in Buffalo, but full credit for the multi possession wins, this reveals a rudimentary expected win total of 7.18 in 13 games.

Turning 7.18 expected wins into 12 real ones means the Chiefs have gotten 4.82 wins above expected in a 13 game stretch. The only team that lucky over the course of a whole year in the history of the league is those 2022 Vikings, and we’re closing in fast on their 5.07 2022 total.

The Chiefs do not cough up an unlosable situation for the fourth week in a row, defeating Cleveland fairly handily in week 15, but damn it if we don’t play one more one possession game against Houston in week 16. It’s the good type, but the Texans do possess the ball on our side of the field trailing by just one point in the second half, for the lowest probability of victory in the second half for us to get as low as 55%. This is all it takes to push us over the edge.

With an expected winning percentage of 52.1% in our 11 one possession games, and four multi possession wins, this gives the 2024 Chiefs 9.73 expected wins, compared to 15 real ones, for a wins over expected total of 5.27, becoming just the second team in NFL history with a score higher than five, and barely edging out the 2022 Minnesota Vikings for the title of the new luckiest team in the history of football.

I want to be clear with everybody that while I’ve been comparing the two a lot, the 2024 Chiefs and 2022 Vikings are not similar. This is not a team that was clutch, like the 2022 Minnesota team. That team was just not good enough to be beating the teams they were beating, and relied on clutch factor to bail themselves out of late game situations that their relatively low (7.92 expected win) team quality got them into, because they were not good enough to break away.

These Chiefs are not that. There are several games where they could have been free and clear (Baltimore, Las Vegas 2x, Tampa Bay, Carolina, Los Angeles the second time, Houston), but instead allowed their opponents to reel them back in, allowing multi possession leads to fall into one possession second half leads in all these games, and deficits in a lot of the cases.

That is not clutch. That is a team continuously putting themselves into bad situations, but still having the guile to work their way out of it. That is the opposite of clutch. Clutch teams (and players) do not create their own bad situations. Clutch would be these Chiefs scoring some extra touchdowns in some third quarters along the way to not face a second half sweat at all. That’s what clutch is. That’s not what this is.

The conclusion that I’ve come to while telling this story is that these Chiefs are not just not clutch, but in fact one of the least clutch teams I’ve ever seen. They constantly showed they were good enough to create good circumstance after good circumstance after good circumstance for themselves, and consistently threw those good circumstances away, often having to rely on one possession game luck (OT coin toss here, missed field goal there) to win games they could have won easily.

These Chiefs were like the Baltimore Ravens in the 2012 Super Bowl (almost blowing it after the lights went out, but their 22 point lead barely being enough to get them through the second half) every week of the year.

It’s not like this ended once the playoffs began either. In the Texans game, the Chiefs took an early ten point lead, and squandered it, instead spending almost the entire second half up by just eight points, before finally pulling out a bit further distance. This is the right kind of close game. Their lowest WP in the second half was 69 percent, but one nonetheless that did not have to happen.

The AFC Championship against Buffalo is the exact same story. An early 21-10 lead allowed to turn into a 22-21 second half deficit, and with Buffalo touching the ball while ahead in the fourth quarter in KC territory, the estimated WP got as low as 36 percent at one point, down from a height of 88 earlier in the game.

That is the 2024 Chiefs’ story. Choking. Just without the losing.

I wish I could say the Super Bowl’s outcome surprised me, but I don’t make a habit of lying to my audience and I won’t start now. Those who pay attention to my Notes (I don’t talk about the present on the mothership) would know that I predicted that the Chiefs would have no trouble containing Saquon Barkley, but still would lose handily. That’s exactly what happened, so I cannot feign surprise.

There was a part of me that hoped that KC would take an early lead before it all fell apart, because that would be a nice narrative ending to this story that I’ve told here, but it’s not negotiable that for a team like the 2024 Chiefs, it always falls apart eventually. There is only one team that is in the top 50 luckiest teams in history, and is also a Super Bowl champion. That team is the 2003 New England Patriots, and it’s literally a meme on this publication how much I talk about the 2003 AFC (take a shot, I brought it up), trying to explain that away.

Unless you are exactly the 2003 New England Patriots, you cannot win a championship this way.

I understand where all the hype about this team came from. If this Kansas City team could just stop shooting their own toes, they would be a great team again, but they just never quite got there. They never quite learned how to hold a lead, which is weird, because you wouldn’t have thought at season’s beginning that the Chiefs were a team that would fall victim to constantly blowing leads, given where they’ve been, but every NFL team is different. The 2024 Chiefs are not the 2023 or 2022 Chiefs. They came with an entirely different character.

For whatever reason, this particular iteration of the Chiefs was stuck with this bad habit. It never truly bit them, as in the end, both of their two true losses were against teams nakedly better than them, who both ran away with quiet multi possession wins over them. Being a 9.73 expected win team fighting with the giants will almost always end badly for the little guy. This is no different, and is in fact exemplary of the experience that typically comes with rooting for an underdog.

For a cross-sport analogy, these 2024 Chiefs remind me greatly of the 2022 Tampa Bay Lightning, a team who went on a fantastic Cinderella playoff run, before falling short at the hands of a far superior Colorado Avalanche team. They will never get proper credit for this underdog run, because of the little detail that they were the two time defending Stanley Cup champions. The 2024 Chiefs are just the same.

They were going against the very best teams in the NFL, hitting well above their roster’s weight. Unfortunately in sports, the playoffs are where good stories go to die. For all of us who are fans of teams that are not the Chiefs, it feels good to let KC fans back in on this reality. They knew it plenty well already, but have been exempt from it for a while. A nice reminder that the playoffs are beholden to nobody is always good.

We should have been cheering loudly for this Cinderella team who just kept winning football games, but we weren’t cheering. This should have been the lovable underdog that we’d remember for years to come, but they weren’t an underdog. What were the 2024 KC Chiefs?

They were the luckiest team in the history of the NFL.

Thanks so much for reading.