A win’s a win, but the Chiefs need to show improvement on defense to repeat as champs
In normal times it would be silly to criticize a team after a road win over a good division opponent, but normal times left us long ago. The Chiefs are Super Bowl champions and have been clear that’s not enough.
They want Super Bowls, not a Super Bowl.
Which means they need to be better than this.
They beat the Raiders 35-31 in Las Vegas Sunday night, and we can talk about some positives. Patrick Mahomes is this planet’s best football player, and Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill make him even better. Also ... well, honestly, there’s not a lot of also here.
Which is why this column needs to be written.
The Chiefs need to be better than this. Demarcus Robinson can’t kill multiple drives with what appeared to be mental errors. The defense can’t go an entire game with only two stops. The Chiefs can’t miss this many tackles, can’t blow this many assignments.
Not if they’re serious about those goals.
Let’s be as clear and real as possible: The Chiefs are better than most teams even with these mistakes. They don’t need their defense to be crisper to make the playoffs, and if the only men who play well are Mahomes, Kelce and Hill, this group still has a chance.
Heck, they came within a literal coin flip of the Super Bowl two years ago with a defense that couldn’t stop a door.
These Chiefs are aiming higher than playoff participation. They want to be the franchise of the decade, remembered forever, and they’re equipped to do it.
But not like this.
The Raiders are good. Yes. They are. Talented. Fast on the outside, tough on the inside. They are no longer a pushover.
But it cannot be overstated how well positioned the Chiefs were to win this game. They had the motivation of their only loss, and the bus lap that dominated social media. They had a week off, and here it’s worth noting that Andy Reid is now 19-3 after bye weeks, the best record in NFL history. The Raiders had 10 defensive players who missed practice while on the COVID-19 list.
The Chiefs had every reason to play their best game of the season, and instead they needed to activate Mahomes’ rule-bending talent in the last 2 minutes for the win.
Most of the problems were on defense. The Chiefs did not make any defensive players available immediately after the game, so it was up to Reid to explain. He acknowledged the problems his team had in creating pressure, and the blown coverages.
“The important thing is to just hang with it in games like this, and you bear down the best you can as time goes on,” he said. “That’s what we did. It was a pretty equally matched game, back and forth. The defense, they beared down when needed most, and that was important.”
That’s not actually true, of course. Reid is being a good leader there and standing up for his guys publicly. Because when the Chiefs needed their defense the most, their defense gave up 12 plays and 75 yards (24 of them on penalties) and a touchdown that put the Raiders up with less than 2 minutes left.
The touchdown was illustrative, too. Raiders quarterback Derek Carr had seven seconds — seven! — to throw, and when he did he found Jason Witten covered in space by Tanoh Kpassagnon (this happened multiple times, for some reason).
But, OK, fine. The NFL has made it harder on defenses than ever, motivated by marketing and player safety. This is tracking for the highest-scoring season in NFL history. Sometimes, shooters get shot.
The larger problem is this isn’t the anomaly. The Chiefs’ defense played well over the back half of the 2019 season (allowing just 11.5 points per game over the final seven games) and still rank in the top 10 in fewest points given up in 2020.
But this is three poor games out of the last six for this defense — 71 points in two games against the Raiders, and 31 against the Panthers.
The good news is it’s all fixable. Unless the Raiders have shown the rest of the league a tell in the Chiefs’ rushes, there is too much talent and too much emphasis from the coaches to believe the pressure won’t come back.
It has to, anyway, because the roster and general philosophy of this defense are built largely on creating consistent pressure. That’s when the defensive backs become better, because they don’t need to cover as long. That’s when turnovers happen, because the opponent panics.
The Chiefs are going through a transition on defense right now. Juan Thornhill played sparingly against the Raiders and was labeled “a situational guy” by Reid afterward. That’s quite a fall, because Thornhill and Tyrann Mathieu formed one of the league’s best pairs of safeties last season.
With the slower (but more reliable) Daniel Sorensen playing more, the Raiders took advantage with star tight end Darren Waller. L’Jarius Sneed, the fast and promising rookie, made his return from injury but also spent many snaps on the sideline. At one point, the NBC cameras caught what appeared to be a heated exchange on the Chiefs sideline involving some of their defensive players.
That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Creative tension can help the collective mission. We’ve seen it many times with this group, most famously with Kelce and offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy.
But the defense has more to clean up, and the stakes are growing every week.
Because Reid and the players can talk about the Raiders being a good team, and they’re correct. But the next opponent is Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Bucs, who are much better.
This is the standard the Chiefs have earned, and have embraced. Good enough to beat the Raiders is not good enough to win another Super Bowl.
This story was originally published November 23, 2020 at 12:16 AM.