The Kansas City Chiefs are 4-4. Is it time we believe what they’re telling us?
A Super Bowl championship logo drapes the backdrop of the Chiefs’ workspace every day, whether it’s weekdays at the practice facility or Sundays at Arrowhead Stadium. The Chiefs are surrounded by memories of all they’ve accomplished recently, even if it’s been removed from their present-day vocabulary.
But as immersed as they might be tangibly, the Chiefs sure feel a long way from any of that now. They look more like a team that will be fighting into January to make the playoffs, not one fighting into February to reach a third straight Super Bowl.
When someone shows you who they are, as poet Maya Angelou once said, believe them the first time.
Is it time we believe what the Chiefs are showing us?
They beat the Giants 20-17 at home on Monday Night Football, needing a game-winning field goal and defensive stop in the final 67 seconds to beat the worst team remaining on their schedule.
They’re 4-4, and they scrap and claw for what they once made look so easy. They spoiled this city these past three years. But as much as one might keep expecting the 2018 Chiefs that Patrick Mahomes carried to the league’s Most Valuable Player award or the 2019 Super Bowl champions or the 2020 runners-up to walk through the door, here we sit, still twiddling our thumbs.
Still waiting.
“We’re new. We’re a new group. It’s a new team. Every team is different,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “Things aren’t as smooth right now as maybe it was then.
“But we’ll get there.”
The Chiefs have won four games — granted, we’re dissecting this after a win, so there’s some tough grading here — but ask yourself this: What’s their most complete victory this season? Was it the Browns in the season opener ... a game in which they trailed by 12 points at halftime?
The win is the most important element of that sentence. But the outing Monday didn’t instill much optimism about their future.
The offense has backtracked from the opening month. Initially, the Chiefs were able to beat two-deep coverages that provided Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill more attention than they desire. Turnovers, back then, were a black eye overshadowing the beauty of the offense we’d grown accustomed to seeing. They were still outpacing even their best selves in points per drive, turnovers be damned.
Not anymore. Bad luck has turned to bad habits. Mahomes has produced three of the worst-five quarterback ratings of his career in the past 23 days. After a week of soul-searching, he mostly did a better job of staying within the pocket, trying to stay within the offense, as he so often puts it. That’s an improvement, and a notable one.
But the Chiefs produced 20 points against the 23rd-ranked defense in the NFL — with four top-10 defenses waiting on the back end of the schedule. And they were handed 7 points by a Willie Gay interception placing them on the doorstep of the end zone.
The Chiefs were better than a week ago — don’t get it twisted — but this group has Super Bowl aspirations.
Maybe it’s unfair to compare this group to its predecessors, but with the core of those Super Bowl teams still intact — Mahomes, Kelce, Hill, Tyrann Mathieu, Chris Jones and plenty more — could you blame us? Heck, they haven’t even lost a coordinator or a front-office member from those groups.
They set these expectations with their own history. They weren’t contrived from fantasy.
“We have guys open. When we’re on the same page with me and receivers with their routes, and then I throw it and hit the right spot, we can move the ball on pretty much any coverage. We have answers for everything,” Mahomes said. “I know in this league that’s happening week after week these last few weeks. But I think we’re going to snap out of it, and we’ll find ways to start executing. And when we do, we’ll be a tough offense to stop.”
To be sure, the Chiefs still have time to regain that momentum. In 2019, the defensive turnaround seemed as quick as a snap of the fingers. That could happen. We don’t know.
They’ve yet to put all phases three together in eight weeks. It only grows more difficult. (Among the final nine games, all nine have a .500 record or better.)
That we do know.
“Everything’s not beautiful right now,” Reid said, “but we’re fighting through that.”