The Chiefs beat a very, very good team and then said things like this: ‘I’m pissed off’
Did you hear the one about Patrick Mahomes buying a piece of the Royals?
Yeah, it’s an impressive catalog. He now owns the Royals, the AFC West, and the Houston Texans.
OK, fine. Apologies.
The weirdest NFL season debut that ever will be (hopefully) ended with a familiar result: The Chiefs beat the Texans 34-20 at Arrowhead Stadium Thursday because Mahomes is awesome, Andy Reid is a better coach than Bill O’Brien, and the Chiefs generally have better football players than the Texans.
In some places, the only thing that will be discussed is the boos that mixed in with cheers during two separate pregame moments — one an NFL video promoting social justice, the other both teams lined up together to promote unity. It was a small number of fans. Players — almost as if they’d been coached on this — downplayed the noise that’s audible in many videos. That’s good PR. But still.
In some places, the only thing that will be discussed is the bizarreness of a top-shelf American sporting event being held with fans during a pandemic. Socially distanced parking spots. Most seats zip-tied to force fans to spread out. Masks required, even outdoors. And a game played in a slow drizzle that never stopped.
Here, for the rest of this column, we will discuss the football.
Because: my goodness, the football.
“We were rocking, man,” Travis Kelce said. “We were out there rocking.”
To be clear, Kelce was talking more about the 15,895 fans allowed at the game and not something specific from the team, but the whole operation was rocking, and if we don’t do the disclaimer now it’ll be too late, so: It’s just one game. The Super Bowl is 150 days away (hopefully!). So much can happen, and a lot of it could be bad. OK. Consider us disclaimed.
The Chiefs are very, very good at football. Mahomes did what Mahomes should do when surrounded by top shelf talent and supported by excellent coaches. He completed 24 of 32 passes, three touchdowns, no interceptions, and the Chiefs scored four touchdowns and a field goal on their first seven possessions.
Watching defensive coaches and players try to earn their paycheck against this group is starting to feel like watching a dog try to chase down a rabbit. Advantage: rabbit.
“That’s the good thing about this offense,” Mahomes said. “It’s a luxury for me. I have a lot of good players that can get themselves open no matter who’s covering them.”
But the defense.
Look, the Texans are good. We can make our Bill O’Brien jokes but Deshaun Watson is a superstar. The DeAndre Hopkins trade was mismanaged, yes, but a team with Watson, Will Fuller, Brandin Cooks, Randall Cobb and David Johnson should score a lot of points.
The Texans had just seven against the Chiefs until midway through the fourth quarter, when the score was out of reach (in part because the Texans seemed to be protecting the Chiefs’ lead with a lot of run calls) and the Chiefs were down their best two cornerbacks.
The Chiefs sacked Watson four times, hit him seven more, and intercepted him when Tyrann Mathieu’s pressure forced a wobbling throw that L’Jarius Sneed (great debut, by the way) intercepted.
“I’m pissed off,” Mathieu said. “In my mind, we’ve got a lot more work to do. I felt like if we would have held those guys at seven points it would have been a much better feeling. I think those guys scoring 20 kind of leaves a bad taste in our mouth. So we have a lot of work to do. I’m looking forward to next week.”
This is where it gets really interesting. This is where the Super Bowl champions, winners of their last 10 games now, can actually, somehow, yes-this-is-a-little-weird-but-still get better.
There was a time not too long ago that the Chiefs winning a game like this would’ve been like a party. Wins are to be celebrated, that’s always the case, but not all celebrations are equal. Some teams celebrate because they don’t know when the next chance will come. That used to be the Chiefs.
Other teams celebrate big plays, because they’re fun, but afterward say things like “I’m pissed off” after keeping a very good offense to one touchdown when the outcome was still in doubt. That’s these Chiefs.
The key is something like sincerity. Not about whether the Chiefs mean what they’re saying. That’s not it. Of course they do. But they’re also not the first Super Bowl champion to say they’re even hungrier than before, or to say they want the second one more than the first, or to say the first just makes them want a dynasty. This is what they all say.
But all of them in the last 15 years have failed to win the Super Bowl.
Now, the Chiefs have a head start. They are young. They are built on speed and creativity and versatility, in a time when those traits have never been more valued in the NFL. They are a model of stability, sprinting straight into a season that figures to reward stability line none before.
They also seem to have a genuine appreciation for this unforgiving truth: If this group of stars, with this unicorn quarterback and this head coach win only one Super Bowl, then none of the will feel satisfied. Many will feel like they failed.
This is a potentially wicked combination, then, of accomplishment and ambition, of talent and drive, of a champion with reason to play harder and smarter than ever before.
They do this thing sometimes. They talk about how they didn’t peak last season. About how the defense needed a while for the coaches and players to understand each other, and about how even at the end they missed assignments or had just a blink of hesitation.
They talk about how Mahomes’ injury — fortunate and borderline miraculous as the recovery was — kept the offense from finding the groove of 2018. They talk about how the playoff comebacks were great, but that needing all those comebacks is a sign that they need to get better.
Skepticism is fine here. Beautiful people love to mention some weight they need to lose. When you’ve achieved, humility or self-criticism becomes a halo.
It doesn’t matter what they say, in the end. It matters what they do.
We’re only one game in. The Chiefs beat a good team, yes, but not the best team they’ll play this season.
But what they did in the season opener — they played clean, they pushed the Texans around on both sides of the ball, they pressured the quarterback and harassed the receivers, they balanced dynamic playmaking with mature decisions, and they beat a team for the fourth time in a row, but in a way that really didn’t resemble the others — was a heck of an initial argument.
The Chiefs won the Super Bowl last season. And, dangit, they have a legitimate chance to be even better.
This story was originally published September 11, 2020 at 12:19 AM.