Your feelings about the Chiefs are your feelings about what Sammy Watkins said
You never know when the moment will hit. That’s true in football, when the ball finds you and the play is either made or not, and it’s also true in the locker room afterward.
The Chiefs celebrated late Monday night. They flew nearly 7 hours and more than 1,000 miles to play a wild game on a field that looked like a driving range’s tee box and in air that sometimes felt like it wasn’t all there.
They fumbled and they recovered and they moved backward and they recovered again, and eventually safety Daniel Sorensen made the interception that sealed a 24-17 win over the L.A. Chargers at Estadio Azteca.
The Chiefs’ defense won a game, and when’s the last time that happened? But the moment that made me write this column came when someone asked Chiefs receiver Sammy Watkins if the Chiefs will win the Super Bowl.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I believe we will win the Super Bowl.”
Now, let’s not go crazy. There is no great way for a proud football player to answer that question. The best you can do is offer some non-answer about only focusing on one day and getting a little better, but where’s the fun in that?
We’re not here to knock Watkins for predicting a Super Bowl championship for a team that has now won three of its last seven games. Because it could happen!
But there’s a long way between that and this, which is really what we wanted to ask him about. And your reaction to this short conversation probably says everything about your feelings for the Chiefs.
We started with a simple question: What has to happen for this team to win that Super Bowl?
“Just heal up,” Watkins said. “We have so many things going on within this team.”
Let’s interject here to point out that he is not wrong. The Chiefs began this game with their full starting offense for the first time since the second quarter of the season opener. And that didn’t even last a full possession, because star receiver Tyreek Hill left with a hamstring injury.
OK, back to Watkins.
“When we start playing our best ball like we did last year, I don’t think we can be stopped,” he said. “I think once the offense starts clicking and the defense is clicking together, I think we’re going to be unstoppable.
“This is the best time to do it now. We haven’t played one good game. All season. We haven’t played good at all, not one game.”
Here, teammate Mecole Hardman interjected from the next locker over: “Just haven’t played a complete game,” the rookie receiver agreed.
More Watkins: “We’ve just been skating by teams. When we put this together it’s going to be crazy.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, but let’s examine the assertion that the Chiefs haven’t played well all season. Professional athletes often carry unrealistically high standards. The Chiefs beat the Ravens this year and controlled the game in wins at Jacksonville and Oakland. Without Mahomes, they destroyed the Broncos and beat the Vikings.
There have been strong moments, in other words, but if Watkins’ point is that the Chiefs haven’t had a day in which they’ve looked like a multidimensional Super Bowl team, he’s undoubtedly correct.
That’s the crux of the point here, and it’s only emphasized by Watkins’ response when asked what it’s like to finally have the offense fully healthy and then see Hill go to the locker room in the first quarter.
“It kind of messes my brain up sometimes,” he said. “It seems like as soon as we get back healthy, as soon as the linemen get back, then something else happens. Seems like something keeps happening with injuries with this team.”
OK. Now.
What do you think when you read those words?
Because you can believe him. You can be in lock-step with every word. It’s all true. They haven’t been healthy. They’ve been running a race against the wind and still lead their division and are viewed by many metrics as one of the NFL’s best teams.
It makes logical sense that this offense, when healthy, can be as good or perhaps even better than it was a year ago. It makes logical sense that the defense is improving. Say what you want about Philip Rivers, but the Chiefs’ defense just intercepted him four times, including on the potential game-winning drive, on a night they allowed just 17 points and gifted their offense a touchdown on Tyrann Mathieu’s interception return.
The Patriots are the bosses until someone beats them, and the Ravens look like the rest of the AFC’s best chance.
But at full strength, with a bye week and five games to ramp up toward the postseason, the Chiefs can be that team nobody wants to play from the wild-card round.
Or maybe you read Watkins’ words differently.
Because you can think he’s full of it. You can think he’s saying what needs to be said, or what he wishes were true. Because there’s evidence that way, too.
The Chiefs were always going to win or lose based on their offense, and the offense just had its least impressive game since Mahomes became the starting quarterback. They were lucky to be in the game early and failed with chances to close late. LeSean McCoy fumbled again, though he recovered it. Mahomes threw a terrible interception.
And you might be thinking that the talk about injuries is starting to sound less like an explanation and more like an excuse. Everybody deals with injuries, and Hill is a rock star talent, but the Chiefs still have enough talent to be better than this — even against one of the league’s better defenses.
You might be thinking that the problem is less about injuries and more about self-destructive penalties, like the eight they committed for 102 yards against the Chargers. There’s no good time to have a penalty, but the Chiefs essentially killed two of their own drives with penalties they did not recover from.
That could be a difference of six points, maybe more. That could be the difference between a playoff loss and something worth remembering.
That’s what makes this particular moment in this particular season feel like such a crossroads. The Chiefs have given you enough to believe each one of Watkins’ words, if you’re so inclined. They’ve also given you enough to refute every point he made.
The truth is that the Chiefs remain in position to do everything they hoped. They play the Raiders after this week’s bye, and Reid is famously successful out of bye weeks. They are likely to be favored in every remaining regular-season game except the one in New England against the Patriots.
They can get healthy. They can peak at the right time. This is all possible.
But another truth is going to hit the Chiefs when their season resumes. Teams that are still asking for trust in December don’t usually play their way their way to Super Bowls in January. They aren’t often the ones with parades in February.
The Chiefs have it all in their control and, actually, there’s something to be said for teams that can win without playing their best. But at some point that best needs to show up.
And those chances don’t continue forever.
This story was originally published November 19, 2019 at 1:26 AM.