Why the Chiefs’ trip to Vegas is one of their most important games of the season
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Chiefs’ Week 18 trip to Vegas will heavily influence their 2026 draft slot.
- A loss secures a top-10 pick and improves trade leverage across rounds.
- The gap between the 8th and 12th picks equals about a mid-3rd-round value.
Three years ago, the Chiefs traveled to Las Vegas for a regular-season finale, needing a win to secure the AFC’s No. 1 seed in the NFL playoffs.
On Sunday, they will arrive in Las Vegas fighting for a different seed.
Their draft spot.
Oh, and the priority this time requires precisely the opposite result.
In less than four months, the Chiefs will make their most important NFL Draft pick since the 2017 first round — you know, when they selected a quarterback from Texas Tech. They have not picked in the top 20 since trading up to acquire Patrick Mahomes that year.
That will change in April.
They’re guaranteed to break that streak this year, and there’s still a path to having an even better selection than the one that landed them Mahomes.
Here’s what could help them most: Losing.
The Chiefs will fall somewhere between the eighth and 12th overall picks in the 2026 NFL Draft next spring.
If they lose Sunday against the Raiders, though, they will pick no worse than ninth. They would rise to eight if they lose and the Saints also win their fifth straight game. The Saints play the Falcons earlier in the day.
If the Chiefs win, on the other hand, they will pick somewhere between ninth and 12th, left to hope the Bengals and Dolphins win so they don’t hop them in the draft order. Basically, there’s enough else at play that even after a win, the Chiefs would most likely fall somewhere in the 10-11 range (with some wiggle room on each side depending on other final-weekend results across the league).
That’s the most likely result, by the way. If you saw the Raiders last weekend, you will recognize that it will take a real effort to lose to them on Sunday afternoon. For all the Chiefs’ absences due to injury, most notably but not exclusively Mahomes, they are still favored 5 1/2 points this weekend on the road.
Anyway, that draft-order range might seem narrow — eighth to 12th — but it’s quite significant.
Per the DraftTek picks value chart, the difference in the eighth and the 12th pick is the equivalent to the value of a mid-Round 3 selection. And that’s the value of the first-round pick alone.
There’s an avenue in which the Chiefs are the only NFL team to finish 6-11, and therefore they would secure the eighth pick in each of the initial five rounds. (Otherwise, while teams are granted tiebreaker advantages for first-round picks, they swap in later rounds.)
That combined value — picking eighth every round instead of 12th every round — is worth the equivalent of a late second-round pick.
So, think this is a meaningless game in Vegas? Well, the Chiefs have the value of a late second-round pick on the line.
It’s the value of No. 62 overall, to be exact.
That’s ... significant for their future. The Chiefs have only twice in the Mahomes era had more than one selection in the initial 62 picks.
Given that, heck, this Sunday is one of the most meaningful games for their long-term future that they’ve had all season. And that’s especially true when you consider the Chiefs are unlikely to have this opportunity again in the near future.
Since Brett Veach took over as general manager in 2018, the Chiefs have traded up four times for their initial section of any particular draft class. In 2024 (Xavier Worthy) and 2022 (Trent McDuffie), those were first-round trades; and in 2018 (Breeland Speaks) and 2019 (Mecole Hardman), their initial selection fell in the second round.
There’s a reason the Chiefs have felt the need to trade up — they have only so many first-round grades on players, and they’re subject to the plans of 31 other teams.
After Sunday, though, they could be subjected to the plans of just seven others.
They can pull their trade-up lever nearly four months in advance — without having to even call another team to do it.
There’s a cleaner path:
Lose.