How this overlooked quality has defined the Chiefs’ best decade-long run
The stadium in Cleveland resides fewer than 20 miles from where Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt attended high school, along the edge of Lake Erie in Willoughby, Ohio.
So naturally, in his first chance to play an NFL game there back in 2018, he “couldn’t wait to touch the ball,” he recalled.
You don’t say.
On his literal first touch in his hometown, Hunt took a screen pass 50 yards to the house. He’d finish the day with three touchdowns. Tight end Travis Kelce, who grew up nearby in Cleveland Heights, scored the other two touchdown in a Chiefs win.
A fitting day.
But we’re not here to re-visit all the intricacies of a 2018 homecoming. Nor do we convene to dissect the encore that comes Sunday, when the Chiefs, Hunt and Kelce return to Ohio to face the Browns.
This is about the six years sandwiched between those two games. This is about the most underrated quality of the best football run in Kansas City history.
Some 2,200 days have passed since the Chiefs made that trip to Cleveland. Earlier this week, Hunt said it felt more like yesterday, and, well, who could really tell the difference? The look is familiar: A one-loss Chiefs team will play a struggling Browns franchise on a Sunday afternoon, a ninth straight AFC West division championship already in their bag.
But the Chiefs’ decade-long ownership of a division — or half-decade ownership of the entire league — has a way of overshadowing what’s actually been the most impressive part of their run:
Their ability to adapt.
The results and record haven’t changed. The top of the depth chart at quarterback — the most important position in sports — hasn’t changed.
The Chiefs? They very much have.
Return to that Browns-Chiefs game for a pretty good launching point. Kansas City scored 37 points that day in 2018, the eighth-most points the team totaled in a game that year. There used to be a coin-flip chance they’d put up 37-plus.
They haven’t scored that many since Sept. 24, 2023. Double-check the year on that. It’s been 15 months.
There’s no way to make that seem complimentary, other than to simply say this: It is.
After all, in those 15 months, the Chiefs squeezed two more division championships, a second consecutive Super Bowl and a 12-1 record with a clear path to the No. 1 seed.
Yes, part of the conclusion, and you don’t need me to tell you this, is that the Chiefs’ offense isn’t what it once was.
Part of the conclusion. The other? They still win anyway, even if in a different way.
They don’t win like the 2018 Chiefs once did. Heck, they don’t even win like the 2024 Chiefs once did.
This season — this plainly imperfect but 12-1 team — is a microcosm of the ability to adjust.
The Chiefs built their offseason around returning the deep passing game to their offense, a strategy predicated, in part, on the free-agent addition of wide receiver Hollywood Brown. He hasn’t played a snap this season (though he’s increasingly likely to return before the regular season concludes).
Oh well. They turned to generating yardage after the catch rather than through the air before it, a strategy predicated, in part, around wide receiver Rashee Rice. He led the league in yards after catch, by a wide margin, before a season-ending knee injury in Week 4.
So much for that. They have employed a run-first operation for much of the year — led by a player who spent training camp on his couch. You might recognize his name from the first sentence of this column.
Next, they acquired a wide receiver before the trade deadline who has forced Patrick Mahomes, statistically the least aggressive quarterback in football, to throw back-shoulder passes.
I won’t even mention the situation at left tackle. Or maybe I just did.
It’s been a season of adaptation.
But a dynasty of adaptation, too.
It’s convenient that Hunt is part of the Chiefs’ locker room as they head to Cleveland this week for the first time since he put on a show in his hometown. But a few things have happened, and nobody is more aware of that.
Hunt was kicked off the team by the Chiefs in 2019 and played five years for the Browns before being out of work altogether. The Chiefs called in September and asked if he’d rather play in some football games this season than watch from his living room. He agreed.
Perfectly symbolic.
The Chiefs have not only changed how they win — but with whom they win. They have taken plug-and-play to the extreme this year, but it came long before 2024.
Yes, there’s commonality at the top. Mahomes, Kelce and Chris Jones are invaluable. The kicker and long-snapper have been here for it all, too.
But, uh, that’s about it. The three Hall of Famers are the standouts. They drive the conversation. They should.
But the conversation has bypassed their capacity to keep the plane flying, even with a different crew onboard.
To wit: The Chiefs’ Super Bowl era has featured five different leading rushers in six seasons — Hunt, Damien Williams, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, Darrel Williams and Isiah Pacheco.
And this is pacing to be the fourth straight year in which the Chiefs’ No. 1 wide receiver has turned over — Tyreek Hill, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Rashee Rice and Xavier Worthy.
It’s the third straight season in which they’ve had a new left tackle. OK, that’s twice I’ve mentioned left tackle.
Look, a lot of teams endure turnover. The bad ones seek it. The best ones do their damndest to avoid it, but the constraints of a salary cap has other plans.
But that’s the precisely the point. The Chiefs haven’t avoided that. They’ve been swept into it. They’ve just, well, adapted.
The salary cap is designed to break up dynasties, not keep them together. It’s why the league navigated two decades without a repeat Super Bowl winner.
Until the Chiefs.
They’ve won with elite offense. They’ve won with elite defense. They’ve won after trading star receivers or letting Pro Bowl players walk in free agency. They’ve even won when they are struggling because the quarterback hasn’t forgotten how to make plays all by his lonesome with the game on the line.
They’ve just plain won. That hasn’t changed.
Even if a lot else has.
This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 6:00 AM.