Reframing the Chiefs from being clutch to chokers definitely goes against the narrative typical of teams who win close games but is a good one.
I think the Chiefs benefited a ton in terms of perception due to their pedigree. While I was skeptical of the Chiefs all year, the fact that I associated this Chiefs team with Chiefs teams of old gave me some pause post AFC championship about calling them lucky or frauds. I had been saying there were going to start losing games at some point but it took until the SB for the damn to break. Similar to the conversation we had about the Patriots, I think as sports fan we (not necessarily you) fall into the trap of ascribing traits of previous iterations of a team unto the current version. For another example, every Cowboys team gets the choker the label, regardless of how the season actually plays out.
Yeah man. It was also a meta moment for me. It was one of the first times I'd ever thought to myself 'is it worth it to print THIS as my opinion?' Stating the KC Chiefs are chokers is an off the beaten path opinion to say the least. It reminds me of when my friend David Harris said 'you could've at least admitted you're the contrarian' under my Kirk Cousins article. The casual fans of mine don't really read these until the weekend, so I'll see that fallout a bit later in the week. It's things like this they talk about when they tell you about the pitfalls of actually having an audience.
As far as the football end of it, you're absolutely correct. It's just like when we talked about the Patriots, about how they won championships, and they also had league leading offences, but they never did both at once, which leads Tom Brady to be overrated in people's minds, because the memories blend together. These Chiefs are exactly like that. People are still ascribing to them the character of the 2022 team that blitzed the league playing this exact same Game Manager Mahomes style of offence, and same Spags defence. Perhaps you even fell into the same habit, but it's not the same.
Although, I'm not sure this Chiefs' reputation for being great in the close game was ever deserved to begin with. I'll explain to you why.
The fact of the matter is that in 2022, the Chiefs played eight games in a 17 game season that were not blowouts in terms of total EPA. Weirdly enough, they played ten one possession games that year, likely indicating either some of this choking character was in that team also, or there was a lot of luck that went against them, because some games were much closer than they should've been based on total EPA count. Either way, this is only eight games that were close on the field (as opposed to close on the scoreboard). The 2022 Chiefs went just 5-3 in those games.
That's not special. There's nothing out of the ordinary about that. Going 5-3 in close games plus a healthy amount of blowouts is how you get a great team. Moving to the 2023 Chiefs, they were much less good. They played 11 games where the total EPA count was within ten, and that's all you need to know about team quality. They went 6-5 in those games.
Five close game losses. Is it that the losses just get blocked out of the memory because they're painful, or is it that the wins are prettier, so they shine brighter? What is it? I'm not seeing a consistent pattern of being great in the close game in the 2022-present Game Manager Mahomes era. I'm seeing a pattern of being 11-8 in the close game, likely 1.5 games better than expected over the course of two seasons in these tight ones. THIS is a pattern that can be caused by skill. What happened in 2024 was not skill.
Only once we get to this year were the Chiefs uniquely out of the ordinary in the close game. They played 12 games this season where the total EPA score was within ten, and went 11-1 in those games. Contrary to the public belief, I don't believe the Chiefs had any outstanding history of outperforming in close games in terms of quality of play (which is a slightly different thing than a one possession game). They've overperformed slightly in the past, which is to be expected from such a good team, but nothing that can come near justifying this.
The 2022-2023 Chiefs would've gone 7-5 in these close games, slightly overperforming the 52.1% expectation I derived, but nowhere near 11-1. This is why I was so willing to chalk it down to luck for the entire year. If this was a team that could do this consistently, they would've done it consistently by now. They haven't, so I don't think they can.
I think the whole narrative of the Chiefs being somehow exceptional in the close game is fake to begin with, other than 2024. 5-3 is not exceptional. 6-5 is not exceptional. I don't want to nakedly accuse people of historical revisionism, but what else do you call this? I think if luck would've been equal, and the Chiefs would've just lost in the 2023 playoffs to Buffalo (they did lose the total EPA battle that day, meaning I treat their win as luck and nothing more), the narrative surrounding these Chiefs would be entirely different, and likely much more correct.
They are not super special in close games. Over that same 2022-2023 span, the Buffalo Bills went 10-9 in games where the total EPA battle was within ten points. Not especially different from KC's 11-8. Where are all the people talking about how elite the Bills are in close games? I don't hear them anywhere.
While I do agree with your hypothesis Marc, my question is where this narrative of the Chiefs being somehow exceptional in the close game comes from to begin with. You can say playoffs, but people were using it to justify regular season performance, so I don't think playoffs really ought to apply. As far as regular season overperformance in close games, the Chiefs had no history of it (other than the slight overperformance inherent in being a good offensive team), and I'm willing to bet they won't have any history of it after this season either. It's luck, and that's all.
It makes me wonder how long we'll have to deal with this vomit inducing half-truth of a narrative as far as winning close games. It was 16 years (2004-2019) with the Patriots. I hope it won't go that long this time.
I think the playoffs do matter in the sense that the feeling off inevitabiltity with the Chiefs has been built on winning close playoff games. The fact the Chiefs have won 3 SB while being down 10 points in each reinforces a clutch narrative. Them winning in 23 despite their regular season woes and winning in 22 despite Mahomes’s ankle and being 0-3 against the Burrow is what leads to them getting by narratively. Once burned, twice shy type of thing.
If the Chiefs keep exceeding expectations and have a pedigree of success, people are going to more likely associate future close success to skill.
But aren't the Chiefs fan types the ones who like to argue that the playoffs and regular season are fundamentally different things? They cannot have it both ways. Why should playoff mettle have anything to do with the regular season if they're so different?
This luck we're talking about is fundamentally a regular season phenomenon, at least in the context that I've talked about it here and I've argued about it on the internet all season long. If the Bills' regular season mettle can't carry into the playoff (so say these types of people), why can the Chiefs' playoff mettle carry into the regular season? I don't think that's an argument that works.
Of course, people tend not to care whether their argument actually makes sense or not. They make it anyway. I deal with this type of thing all the time when talking about Trent Green. People will continue to insist that he's meh, despite being elite both in the regular season and in his one real playoff chance. When I talk about how big his numbers are, they say 'meh, supporting cast.' When I talk about how his supporting cast was much worse than Kurt Warner's, they say 'meh, big numbers.'
Same thing goes here. When I talk about how good the Bills are in one score games, people say 'LOL. That doesn't carry into the playoffs,' but when I talk about the Chiefs in one score games, and how it's a phenomenon entirely centralised in the playoffs, people this season talked about how that carried into the regular year.
This infuriates me, because it makes no sense. These people basically argue for one way causation. Playoff trends mean a lot in the regular season, but regular season trends mean nothing in the postseason. That's crap as far as I'm concerned, as is this whole Chiefs zeitgeist.
It makes me feel bad, because I don't hate the Chiefs, nor their fans. I hate the things that the Chiefs cause people who are not Chiefs fans to say and do. It's like the Patriots except even worse in terms of how they ruin football discourse.
I would love to see you look at some of the early Mahomes Chiefs seasons, particularly 2020, which shares a lot of superficial similarities with this 2024 team, and is I think part of the answer to your question about the chiefs clutch reputation. 2024 was not the first year they greatly outperformed their expected wins, and even though they shouldn’t, people tend to give credit to previous iterations of a team and let it affect how they view the present one.
It's true, but I think that people now can accept that the 2017-2021 Chiefs are dead. Gary Davis and I argue about this a lot. That Chiefs team featured Tyreek Hill, and a lot of chucking the ball down the field. They played an all gas, no brakes kind of style, relying exclusively on their overpowering offence to try to win football games, which was extremely fun to watch, but is just not what KC does anymore.
These days, they play in the Game Manager Mahomes style, with lots of short passes, lots of third downs, and a lot more punting, quite frankly. They can get away with this because they've got more brakes these days, with that solid defence they've had for the last three seasons now. I've just taken to separating the two Chiefs' eras because they play so fundamentally differently than they used to. Perhaps you are correct though. Perhaps it it is like with the Patriots, where the memories blend together, despite the two different Chiefs eras not even being that similar other than the laundry.
You are absolutely right about 2020, as those Chiefs played just seven games where the game was decided by ten total EPA or less, and won all seven. Add this to seven blowout wins and two blowout losses, and you get their 14-2 record. I'd just like to note that this is still just seven games, meaning this was a fantastic KC Chiefs team under the hood, but they did have one possession games on their side. You're very much correct about that.
This spooked me a little bit. Was the close game magic something that was just lost in the transition from the Patrick Mahomes era to the Game Manager Mahomes era?
Not really.
In 2018 they went 4-2 in close games. In 2019 they went 4-3. In 2021 they went 5-3, so 2020 was just as much of a blip as 2024 was. I'm willing to attribute the Chiefs' always positive record to skill, but nothing more than that. In every year except these two anomalies, they barely differentiate themselves from .500 with one game here or there. That's what one possession skill is. Slight overachievement. One game per year approximately. Anybody who believes the Chiefs are where they are because of their magic in the close game is just wrong in my opinion.
The Chiefs are where they are because they've played close games in less than half of their total games five times since 2018, most of anybody. It's the blowout wins that have kept the Chiefs going, not any one possession game nonsense. They're good in the close game, but not significantly better than any other good team. That's a playoff narrative that's being misattributed to the regular season, where it really doesn't exist.
I've never tried to deny that KC has the secret sauce in playoff games (8-2 in their ten close playoff games in the Mahomes times, although if two more FGs went through the uprights, something the Chiefs don't control, this could've been 6-4 really easily, and what would we think of the Chiefs then?), but as far as the regular season goes, this narrative that the Chiefs are better than any other top level team in the close game is crap. It's always been crap, and I suspect it always will be.
A lot of these Chiefs games just sucked to watch, and I think that's a big part of the reason people were rooting so hard for the privilege not to watch them anymore. It's been this way ever since 2021, when the Chiefs decided in the 2022 offseason that they were done with being exciting. They were going to go the 'check down on every play' route instead. I can't take away that in 2022 and 2023 it worked for them, but this season I refuse to give them any credit for anything. They're playing this extremely boring style, and not even getting good offensive results out of it anymore. Their defence is good, but not good enough to sell the tickets on their own, so it's just this team with a meh offence, meh defence, and plays in an extremely boring way, snoozing up the NFL playoffs again.
Underrated reason why the Chiefs have became so hated, in my opinion.
"No offence to Bo Nix, but he shouldn’t be outperforming the KC Chiefs’ offence at anything."
If Bo continues the trajectory we saw in his rookie season, he may make you eat those words. Working with a roster that was handicapped by Russ Wilson's dead cap money and forecast to be one of the worst in the NFL, he went from an unimpressive start to taking the Broncos to the playoffs. He's not Patrick Mahomes, but he's certainly good enough that the Chiefs aren't guaranteed the AFC West title going forward.
I'm impressed that you wrote an entire summary of how the Chiefs barely won so many of their games without mentioning the officiating. Yes, the degree to which it favored the Chiefs overall was way overblown, but two or three of their close wins this season did hinge on close or even questionable calls by the refs. I don't think it was some conspiracy or anything like that, but just one more way they were the luckiest team.
Hey yo. I'm a big Bo Nix guy. I have nothing against him at all. I think his ability to avoid negative plays is prodigious. I think his pocket presence is excellent. He's got the best feet in the 2024 class, and if he can ever get his arm to catch up to the level of his feet, to the point where he can make the throws consistently, which he couldn't really do in 2024 except for a few games, he's got potential to be the best QB in the class. I didn't mean anything negative against him at all. I meant everything negative about the Kansas City Chiefs, who with where they've been, should not be getting outperformed by any rookie QB on offence in any circumstance. That's all I meant by it.
I think you're correct in your assertions about the Denver Broncos. Quite frankly, I think they were already better than the KC Chiefs this year. They basically played them to a tie in the only real game they played. Denver's rookie QB had a bad blow up in the playoff game, so they were out early. It happens, but he won't be a rookie forever. I think you're absolutely right that if the Broncos can keep everything together on the defensive side, and Bo NIx makes the forecastable improvements I laid out above, they're a threat in the AFC West going forward. So are the Chargers by the way if they can keep that defence together, so it's possible we're finally going to get to see what the Chiefs can do in a division with other real football teams in it.
As far as the officiating goes, I saw a lot of it prepping to write the passage about the CIncinnati game, and decided for the whole rest of the piece that I just wasn't going to go there. When I did the counts of successful offensive plays, I did not count penalties, which is why you can go on rbsdm.com and see that the Chiefs' second half offence was actually one of the best in the NFL, but my counts were always so low. There's a lot of penalty yardage in there, without doubt. I just wasn't going to go there. This wasn't an article about the officiating. It was about the quality (or lack of quality) of the Chiefs' play.
I've talked before about how biased officiating is a status that is earned. This is more or less an accepted reality in basketball for instance. It's the truth in football too, but for whatever reason there's this taboo about coming out and saying it. Much like LeBron James gets a favourable eye from every official, as does every team he's on by extension, the same applies to Patrick Mahomes. He's earned this biased officiating. In this way, the game is rigged, but it's rigged in a way that most people are willing to accept, 'protect the stars' and all that.
We can argue about whether biased officiating being a status you can earn is a good or a bad thing for the game, but the fact of the matter is it's a part of every game. Greg Maddux got more strike calls. LeBron James gets more foul calls. Reggie Wayne got more DPIs, etc.. Anything Patrick Mahomes is associated with will benefit from biased officiating, probably forever at this point. As long as everybody knows that up front, I don't think it's too big of a problem.
Don't get me wrong. It sucks that North American sports leagues are not capable of officiating the stars the same way they do everybody else, but this has been happening for years (cough cough, John Elway), and that's why I didn't bring up the officiating. Bringing it up in this case would make it seem like the Chiefs have singularly benefitted from biased officiating, when in fact they're just the most recent in a long line of teams throughout this league's (and every league's) history that have earned that status. I'm not saying that the existence of such a status is okay, but I am saying that people complain loudly about it when it's the Chiefs, but they don't complain so loudly about it when talking about all of John Elway's playoff wins. Me talking about the officiating here would just feed this narrative even more, and I was not willing to do that.
That's totally fair, and a great point about how it happens to some extent in every league. Human nature I guess. I really don't think the Chiefs benefit all that much (as much as I'd like to claim it's the case being a Broncos fan). Andy Reid teams just don't make a lot of mistakes that get penalized. And once the narrative is out there, everyone pays a lot more attention to the calls that do favor the Chiefs and ignore the calls that don't.
Honestly I think it's going to hurt the Chiefs in the long run. The refs don't want to have a reputation as being biased, and eventually that's going to outweigh any earned status that gets them favorable calls.
I agree. There's only so much good that officiating can do. It's literally about two plays per game, if it's there at all. Still, penalties tend to be extremely big swings, so this can be around three EPA in a game or so (unless it's like Houston, where the officiating swung 16.5 EPA in their favour, in a game they won by a lot less than that). Officiating never claims to treat everybody equally. They really can mess it up like this on a one-day basis, but they can't do it for a whole season basis. Eventually, people will forget about the Houston game, and things will go back to normal.
Reframing the Chiefs from being clutch to chokers definitely goes against the narrative typical of teams who win close games but is a good one.
I think the Chiefs benefited a ton in terms of perception due to their pedigree. While I was skeptical of the Chiefs all year, the fact that I associated this Chiefs team with Chiefs teams of old gave me some pause post AFC championship about calling them lucky or frauds. I had been saying there were going to start losing games at some point but it took until the SB for the damn to break. Similar to the conversation we had about the Patriots, I think as sports fan we (not necessarily you) fall into the trap of ascribing traits of previous iterations of a team unto the current version. For another example, every Cowboys team gets the choker the label, regardless of how the season actually plays out.
Yeah man. It was also a meta moment for me. It was one of the first times I'd ever thought to myself 'is it worth it to print THIS as my opinion?' Stating the KC Chiefs are chokers is an off the beaten path opinion to say the least. It reminds me of when my friend David Harris said 'you could've at least admitted you're the contrarian' under my Kirk Cousins article. The casual fans of mine don't really read these until the weekend, so I'll see that fallout a bit later in the week. It's things like this they talk about when they tell you about the pitfalls of actually having an audience.
As far as the football end of it, you're absolutely correct. It's just like when we talked about the Patriots, about how they won championships, and they also had league leading offences, but they never did both at once, which leads Tom Brady to be overrated in people's minds, because the memories blend together. These Chiefs are exactly like that. People are still ascribing to them the character of the 2022 team that blitzed the league playing this exact same Game Manager Mahomes style of offence, and same Spags defence. Perhaps you even fell into the same habit, but it's not the same.
Although, I'm not sure this Chiefs' reputation for being great in the close game was ever deserved to begin with. I'll explain to you why.
The fact of the matter is that in 2022, the Chiefs played eight games in a 17 game season that were not blowouts in terms of total EPA. Weirdly enough, they played ten one possession games that year, likely indicating either some of this choking character was in that team also, or there was a lot of luck that went against them, because some games were much closer than they should've been based on total EPA count. Either way, this is only eight games that were close on the field (as opposed to close on the scoreboard). The 2022 Chiefs went just 5-3 in those games.
That's not special. There's nothing out of the ordinary about that. Going 5-3 in close games plus a healthy amount of blowouts is how you get a great team. Moving to the 2023 Chiefs, they were much less good. They played 11 games where the total EPA count was within ten, and that's all you need to know about team quality. They went 6-5 in those games.
Five close game losses. Is it that the losses just get blocked out of the memory because they're painful, or is it that the wins are prettier, so they shine brighter? What is it? I'm not seeing a consistent pattern of being great in the close game in the 2022-present Game Manager Mahomes era. I'm seeing a pattern of being 11-8 in the close game, likely 1.5 games better than expected over the course of two seasons in these tight ones. THIS is a pattern that can be caused by skill. What happened in 2024 was not skill.
Only once we get to this year were the Chiefs uniquely out of the ordinary in the close game. They played 12 games this season where the total EPA score was within ten, and went 11-1 in those games. Contrary to the public belief, I don't believe the Chiefs had any outstanding history of outperforming in close games in terms of quality of play (which is a slightly different thing than a one possession game). They've overperformed slightly in the past, which is to be expected from such a good team, but nothing that can come near justifying this.
The 2022-2023 Chiefs would've gone 7-5 in these close games, slightly overperforming the 52.1% expectation I derived, but nowhere near 11-1. This is why I was so willing to chalk it down to luck for the entire year. If this was a team that could do this consistently, they would've done it consistently by now. They haven't, so I don't think they can.
I think the whole narrative of the Chiefs being somehow exceptional in the close game is fake to begin with, other than 2024. 5-3 is not exceptional. 6-5 is not exceptional. I don't want to nakedly accuse people of historical revisionism, but what else do you call this? I think if luck would've been equal, and the Chiefs would've just lost in the 2023 playoffs to Buffalo (they did lose the total EPA battle that day, meaning I treat their win as luck and nothing more), the narrative surrounding these Chiefs would be entirely different, and likely much more correct.
They are not super special in close games. Over that same 2022-2023 span, the Buffalo Bills went 10-9 in games where the total EPA battle was within ten points. Not especially different from KC's 11-8. Where are all the people talking about how elite the Bills are in close games? I don't hear them anywhere.
While I do agree with your hypothesis Marc, my question is where this narrative of the Chiefs being somehow exceptional in the close game comes from to begin with. You can say playoffs, but people were using it to justify regular season performance, so I don't think playoffs really ought to apply. As far as regular season overperformance in close games, the Chiefs had no history of it (other than the slight overperformance inherent in being a good offensive team), and I'm willing to bet they won't have any history of it after this season either. It's luck, and that's all.
It makes me wonder how long we'll have to deal with this vomit inducing half-truth of a narrative as far as winning close games. It was 16 years (2004-2019) with the Patriots. I hope it won't go that long this time.
I think the playoffs do matter in the sense that the feeling off inevitabiltity with the Chiefs has been built on winning close playoff games. The fact the Chiefs have won 3 SB while being down 10 points in each reinforces a clutch narrative. Them winning in 23 despite their regular season woes and winning in 22 despite Mahomes’s ankle and being 0-3 against the Burrow is what leads to them getting by narratively. Once burned, twice shy type of thing.
If the Chiefs keep exceeding expectations and have a pedigree of success, people are going to more likely associate future close success to skill.
But aren't the Chiefs fan types the ones who like to argue that the playoffs and regular season are fundamentally different things? They cannot have it both ways. Why should playoff mettle have anything to do with the regular season if they're so different?
This luck we're talking about is fundamentally a regular season phenomenon, at least in the context that I've talked about it here and I've argued about it on the internet all season long. If the Bills' regular season mettle can't carry into the playoff (so say these types of people), why can the Chiefs' playoff mettle carry into the regular season? I don't think that's an argument that works.
Of course, people tend not to care whether their argument actually makes sense or not. They make it anyway. I deal with this type of thing all the time when talking about Trent Green. People will continue to insist that he's meh, despite being elite both in the regular season and in his one real playoff chance. When I talk about how big his numbers are, they say 'meh, supporting cast.' When I talk about how his supporting cast was much worse than Kurt Warner's, they say 'meh, big numbers.'
Same thing goes here. When I talk about how good the Bills are in one score games, people say 'LOL. That doesn't carry into the playoffs,' but when I talk about the Chiefs in one score games, and how it's a phenomenon entirely centralised in the playoffs, people this season talked about how that carried into the regular year.
This infuriates me, because it makes no sense. These people basically argue for one way causation. Playoff trends mean a lot in the regular season, but regular season trends mean nothing in the postseason. That's crap as far as I'm concerned, as is this whole Chiefs zeitgeist.
It makes me feel bad, because I don't hate the Chiefs, nor their fans. I hate the things that the Chiefs cause people who are not Chiefs fans to say and do. It's like the Patriots except even worse in terms of how they ruin football discourse.
I would love to see you look at some of the early Mahomes Chiefs seasons, particularly 2020, which shares a lot of superficial similarities with this 2024 team, and is I think part of the answer to your question about the chiefs clutch reputation. 2024 was not the first year they greatly outperformed their expected wins, and even though they shouldn’t, people tend to give credit to previous iterations of a team and let it affect how they view the present one.
It's true, but I think that people now can accept that the 2017-2021 Chiefs are dead. Gary Davis and I argue about this a lot. That Chiefs team featured Tyreek Hill, and a lot of chucking the ball down the field. They played an all gas, no brakes kind of style, relying exclusively on their overpowering offence to try to win football games, which was extremely fun to watch, but is just not what KC does anymore.
These days, they play in the Game Manager Mahomes style, with lots of short passes, lots of third downs, and a lot more punting, quite frankly. They can get away with this because they've got more brakes these days, with that solid defence they've had for the last three seasons now. I've just taken to separating the two Chiefs' eras because they play so fundamentally differently than they used to. Perhaps you are correct though. Perhaps it it is like with the Patriots, where the memories blend together, despite the two different Chiefs eras not even being that similar other than the laundry.
You are absolutely right about 2020, as those Chiefs played just seven games where the game was decided by ten total EPA or less, and won all seven. Add this to seven blowout wins and two blowout losses, and you get their 14-2 record. I'd just like to note that this is still just seven games, meaning this was a fantastic KC Chiefs team under the hood, but they did have one possession games on their side. You're very much correct about that.
This spooked me a little bit. Was the close game magic something that was just lost in the transition from the Patrick Mahomes era to the Game Manager Mahomes era?
Not really.
In 2018 they went 4-2 in close games. In 2019 they went 4-3. In 2021 they went 5-3, so 2020 was just as much of a blip as 2024 was. I'm willing to attribute the Chiefs' always positive record to skill, but nothing more than that. In every year except these two anomalies, they barely differentiate themselves from .500 with one game here or there. That's what one possession skill is. Slight overachievement. One game per year approximately. Anybody who believes the Chiefs are where they are because of their magic in the close game is just wrong in my opinion.
The Chiefs are where they are because they've played close games in less than half of their total games five times since 2018, most of anybody. It's the blowout wins that have kept the Chiefs going, not any one possession game nonsense. They're good in the close game, but not significantly better than any other good team. That's a playoff narrative that's being misattributed to the regular season, where it really doesn't exist.
I've never tried to deny that KC has the secret sauce in playoff games (8-2 in their ten close playoff games in the Mahomes times, although if two more FGs went through the uprights, something the Chiefs don't control, this could've been 6-4 really easily, and what would we think of the Chiefs then?), but as far as the regular season goes, this narrative that the Chiefs are better than any other top level team in the close game is crap. It's always been crap, and I suspect it always will be.
And one of the most aggravating to watch, I shall say
You're absolutely right.
A lot of these Chiefs games just sucked to watch, and I think that's a big part of the reason people were rooting so hard for the privilege not to watch them anymore. It's been this way ever since 2021, when the Chiefs decided in the 2022 offseason that they were done with being exciting. They were going to go the 'check down on every play' route instead. I can't take away that in 2022 and 2023 it worked for them, but this season I refuse to give them any credit for anything. They're playing this extremely boring style, and not even getting good offensive results out of it anymore. Their defence is good, but not good enough to sell the tickets on their own, so it's just this team with a meh offence, meh defence, and plays in an extremely boring way, snoozing up the NFL playoffs again.
Underrated reason why the Chiefs have became so hated, in my opinion.
"No offence to Bo Nix, but he shouldn’t be outperforming the KC Chiefs’ offence at anything."
If Bo continues the trajectory we saw in his rookie season, he may make you eat those words. Working with a roster that was handicapped by Russ Wilson's dead cap money and forecast to be one of the worst in the NFL, he went from an unimpressive start to taking the Broncos to the playoffs. He's not Patrick Mahomes, but he's certainly good enough that the Chiefs aren't guaranteed the AFC West title going forward.
I'm impressed that you wrote an entire summary of how the Chiefs barely won so many of their games without mentioning the officiating. Yes, the degree to which it favored the Chiefs overall was way overblown, but two or three of their close wins this season did hinge on close or even questionable calls by the refs. I don't think it was some conspiracy or anything like that, but just one more way they were the luckiest team.
Hey yo. I'm a big Bo Nix guy. I have nothing against him at all. I think his ability to avoid negative plays is prodigious. I think his pocket presence is excellent. He's got the best feet in the 2024 class, and if he can ever get his arm to catch up to the level of his feet, to the point where he can make the throws consistently, which he couldn't really do in 2024 except for a few games, he's got potential to be the best QB in the class. I didn't mean anything negative against him at all. I meant everything negative about the Kansas City Chiefs, who with where they've been, should not be getting outperformed by any rookie QB on offence in any circumstance. That's all I meant by it.
I think you're correct in your assertions about the Denver Broncos. Quite frankly, I think they were already better than the KC Chiefs this year. They basically played them to a tie in the only real game they played. Denver's rookie QB had a bad blow up in the playoff game, so they were out early. It happens, but he won't be a rookie forever. I think you're absolutely right that if the Broncos can keep everything together on the defensive side, and Bo NIx makes the forecastable improvements I laid out above, they're a threat in the AFC West going forward. So are the Chargers by the way if they can keep that defence together, so it's possible we're finally going to get to see what the Chiefs can do in a division with other real football teams in it.
As far as the officiating goes, I saw a lot of it prepping to write the passage about the CIncinnati game, and decided for the whole rest of the piece that I just wasn't going to go there. When I did the counts of successful offensive plays, I did not count penalties, which is why you can go on rbsdm.com and see that the Chiefs' second half offence was actually one of the best in the NFL, but my counts were always so low. There's a lot of penalty yardage in there, without doubt. I just wasn't going to go there. This wasn't an article about the officiating. It was about the quality (or lack of quality) of the Chiefs' play.
I've talked before about how biased officiating is a status that is earned. This is more or less an accepted reality in basketball for instance. It's the truth in football too, but for whatever reason there's this taboo about coming out and saying it. Much like LeBron James gets a favourable eye from every official, as does every team he's on by extension, the same applies to Patrick Mahomes. He's earned this biased officiating. In this way, the game is rigged, but it's rigged in a way that most people are willing to accept, 'protect the stars' and all that.
We can argue about whether biased officiating being a status you can earn is a good or a bad thing for the game, but the fact of the matter is it's a part of every game. Greg Maddux got more strike calls. LeBron James gets more foul calls. Reggie Wayne got more DPIs, etc.. Anything Patrick Mahomes is associated with will benefit from biased officiating, probably forever at this point. As long as everybody knows that up front, I don't think it's too big of a problem.
Don't get me wrong. It sucks that North American sports leagues are not capable of officiating the stars the same way they do everybody else, but this has been happening for years (cough cough, John Elway), and that's why I didn't bring up the officiating. Bringing it up in this case would make it seem like the Chiefs have singularly benefitted from biased officiating, when in fact they're just the most recent in a long line of teams throughout this league's (and every league's) history that have earned that status. I'm not saying that the existence of such a status is okay, but I am saying that people complain loudly about it when it's the Chiefs, but they don't complain so loudly about it when talking about all of John Elway's playoff wins. Me talking about the officiating here would just feed this narrative even more, and I was not willing to do that.
That's totally fair, and a great point about how it happens to some extent in every league. Human nature I guess. I really don't think the Chiefs benefit all that much (as much as I'd like to claim it's the case being a Broncos fan). Andy Reid teams just don't make a lot of mistakes that get penalized. And once the narrative is out there, everyone pays a lot more attention to the calls that do favor the Chiefs and ignore the calls that don't.
Honestly I think it's going to hurt the Chiefs in the long run. The refs don't want to have a reputation as being biased, and eventually that's going to outweigh any earned status that gets them favorable calls.
I agree. There's only so much good that officiating can do. It's literally about two plays per game, if it's there at all. Still, penalties tend to be extremely big swings, so this can be around three EPA in a game or so (unless it's like Houston, where the officiating swung 16.5 EPA in their favour, in a game they won by a lot less than that). Officiating never claims to treat everybody equally. They really can mess it up like this on a one-day basis, but they can't do it for a whole season basis. Eventually, people will forget about the Houston game, and things will go back to normal.