After Chiefs’ 27-point victory, Broncos player says teams are ‘neck-and-neck’
Strip away the interception return for a touchdown. Throw out the kickoff return for a touchdown. Ignore the other three turnovers.
Do all that and the Chiefs likely don’t beat the Broncos 43-16 in Denver on Sunday. But that’s not how it works, right?
Sunday’s victory continued the Chiefs’ mastery of the Broncos. In the last three meetings, the Chiefs have outscored Denver 96-25, and Kansas City has won 10 straight against its AFC West rival.
A few of the Broncos players were asked about the Chiefs’ domination following the game, but they were not buying it.
“I think we’re neck-and-neck,” tackle Garrett Boles said, per the postgame quote sheet. “That’s just me, personally. I don’t think there’s really anything that makes them more spectacular than us. We have a lot of dogs in this locker room. We have a lot of people. We match them speed for speed.
“Our defense is probably better than their defense, but it comes down to the little mistakes that we continue to make. We turn over the ball. We turn over the ball with the Super Bowl champs — a team like that with (Chiefs quarterback Patrick) Mahomes — they’re going to put points on them.”
Boles then pointed to the Raiders’ 40-32 win over the Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium as template for beating Kansas City. However, he got the score wrong.
“Look back (at) what the Raiders did,” he said. “They controlled the game clock, they controlled the fill and they ended up winning 42-20. You look at things like that, and that’s the thing that we’re just not doing. It’s very frustrating for me, it’s very frustrating for the offensive line, in general. We’ve got to go back, and we’ve got to, like I said, we’ve got to take a gut-check and figure out how we can stop those wounds that keep bleeding.”
Broncos safety Justin Simmons was asked if he felt like the Chiefs were that much better of a team.
“No. They’re talented but there’s a lot of times where things can be self-inflicted, and I’m talking about all phases of the ball — defense included,” Simmons said. “There were some of those tonight on the defense. I don’t know what the numbers were, but we just didn’t find a way to play enough to win us the game in all three phases.
“It is what it is, but we have one more shot — we play them later down the road and we’ll have a chance to go play them at their place. We need to be way better.”
Broncos coach Vic Fangio said his team simply didn’t do enough to win Sunday.
“It was disappointing obviously,” Fangio said. “We just didn’t play well as a team to obviously give us a chance to win the game there. The four turnovers, the kickoff return for a touchdown, you’re not going to beat a team like Kansas City doing that. A couple of the turnovers gave them good field position but our whole team just got beat today by them. They’re really good and we weren’t up to the challenge today.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 9:53 AM.
