Charcandrick West emerges in place of injured Jamaal Charles

Wielding the American League championship trophy, Royals manager Ned Yost stood with a handful of his players on the Arrowhead Stadium sideline to rousing applause before the Chiefs played host to Pittsburgh on Sunday.

With the Royals to begin the World Series on Tuesday and the depressing Chiefs entering the game 1-5, for a good bit of the next three hours the presence of the Royals loomed as the most inspiring moment of the day at Arrowhead.

The Chiefs’ rotten record and the season-ending knee injury to Jamaal Charles, after all, have persuasively combined to suggest they might as well just drain the clock and start sorting things out for the 2016 season.

So at halftime, when they clung to a tedious 9-3 lead on three field goals, that mostly just served to remind they had scored exactly two offensive touchdowns in their last 3  1/2 games and left the door open for another second-half sag.

But even if you’re inclined to give up on their season, the Chiefs showed that they aren’t with a plucky 23-13 win fashioned by stout and opportune defense and a rejiggered and revived offensive line.

Perhaps most improbably and nearly as important, it also was delivered with a sterling performance from Charles’ replacement, Charcandrick West.

Yes, the same man whose last game was marked by the clownish-but-costly fumble he lost when the ball was poked out by Chiefs offensive lineman Donald Stephenson.

A week after West stood and owned that misplay, he was almost giddy after rushing 22 times for 110 yards and his first NFL touchdown in a game that effectively said this:

Just because he isn’t Charles doesn’t mean he can’t provide a significant boost to this team.

“You can’t replace Jamaal Charles; he’s one of a kind,” West said. “So we’ve all got to put in piece by piece by piece to help us win each and every week.”

A nice sliver of that on Sunday was West barging in from 1 yard out for a touchdown.

That may not sound like a monumental achievement, but it was the Chiefs’ first rushing touchdown in four games and left the refreshingly exuberant West “still in the clouds” long after the game.

“I haven’t come down from it yet,” he said. “I’m still in the end zone.”

Charles was part of this moment for West, 24, who was signed last year by the Chiefs as an undrafted free agent out of Abilene Christian and has supplanted 2013 third-round draft pick Knile Davis.

Not only had Charles imposed a $200 fine on West for the fumble, a part of making West determined that the toll not go up, but he also offered various other forms of encouragement.

“Jamaal told us last week … to write on a piece of paper what you’re going to do,” he said, “and I wrote 100 yards and a touchdown down.”

So West “went to sleep” visualizing this, since “you’ve got to see it before it happens.”

Also as it happens, though, West wrote down the same thing before last week’s game at Minnesota, in which he rushed nine times for 37 yards.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling, “I did.”

If Charles was a tangible influence on West, a more spiritual one was with him as well: mentor and coach Dante’ Coleman, whom West sees as the one responsible for putting a football in his hands as a child.

After Coleman died in the summer, West put a No. 35 Chiefs jersey in his coffin, as The Star’s Terez Paylor wrote about in an excellent story about West.

Now, West said, he constantly asks Coleman to “just please be with me.”

That includes in his final thoughts before a game starts.

“Oh, man, I think about him every second of the day,” he said. “He was with me on that touchdown. He’s with me in everything I do.

“I know he saw it, but I wish he was here with me to enjoy the moment.”

West had plenty of others with him through everything on Sunday, including an offensive line that he said blocked so well “anybody” could have done what he did.

Beyond that, at one point, tackle Eric Fisher took issue with a Steelers defender roughing up West after a play and was cited for 15-yard unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty for taunting.

At another point, West incurred his own personal-foul penalty for mixing it up with a Steelers defender after what the Chiefs considered a late hit on Alex Smith.

“I’m just trying to protect my brothers, man …,” he said. “You’ve got to protect family.”

His own family is back in Louisiana, from where West went to then-Division II Abilene Christian after he was academically ineligible

“I mean, I played Division II football,” said West, who still was jarred not to get drafted after what he considered “an amazing” Pro Day workout for NFL scouts. “That was a heartbreaking moment, but you’ve just got to keep fighting.

“That’s not the first time I’ve been counted out.”

And at a time the Chiefs seem pretty well counted out and stand in the shadow of the Royals, he epitomizes the reason to keep playing.

This story was originally published October 25, 2015 at 7:53 PM with the headline "Charcandrick West emerges in place of injured Jamaal Charles."