On the Kansas City Chiefs and the fight behind the fireworks
You can fan however you want, but please, free advice here: Don’t be the fan freaking out about a close win over a division rival.
Don’t be the one complaining about not covering the spread, or that a 22-16 win over the Denver Broncos at Arrowhead Stadium on Sunday had much tangible effect other than boring a casual national audience and clinching another playoff spot.
Be the one looking just a bit deeper.
Be the one who sees the Chiefs own the Broncos, evidenced not just by the 65-32 aggregate score this season and 11 straight victories over Denver, but a few moments that could’ve pushed Sunday’s final score bigger.
Tyreek Hill missed one touchdown on the coaching staff’s failure to challenge a bad call, and another on a holding penalty. The Chiefs got nothing but field goals in four red zone possessions, which is a legitimate concern at the moment but not yet worth a rant.
If any of these moments — or others — go with the Chiefs’ typical wind then this is another blowout.
Instead, it became an opportunity less common: to see the Chiefs fight themselves a little, to need to win over 60 minutes when many expected a blowout.
“We finished it up when everything wasn’t going right,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “In years past, maybe you don’t win that game.”
That’s an unintentional window into how Reid sees this particular group. He is famously guarded in group interviews, especially immediately after games.
The Chiefs are the best show on television because of their speed and brains and ability to turn that old T-shirt in the back of the closet into a touchdown.
But they are Super Bowl champions because of this ability to step away from the highlights, and win in a dark alley. Their best moments can be like a fireworks show, but they don’t need them to win.
It’s not as fun as the first quarter against the Bucs — on this night, Hill’s backflip into the end zone was called back on a penalty — but it could be more telling.
“Instead of complaining, they reached a little deeper and tried to find an answer,” Reid said. “You do that, with this crew, normally it’s going to work for you.”
This is, in other words, a rocket ship that can also win like an old pickup truck. That’s a heck of a trick to pull off. They come to every game with nine ways to win, and the Broncos killed eight of them but had only so much juice.
The Chiefs are imperfect. They have flaws. We’ve seen them, and we saw some of them against the Broncos.
The offensive line is without two Week 1 starters. Mahomes doesn’t always trust them in pass protection, and Reid rarely trusts them in short yardage. The former can lead to missed opportunities; the latter has fed into red zone struggles the last two weeks.
The pass rush appeared more effective in creating pressure against Broncos quarterback Drew Lock than it had recently, but they still rarely hit him, and will need more in the postseason. They also gave up 131 yards on 15 carries to Melvin Gordon, which by now is on brand.
The Broncos are a bad opponent to use as a learning tool, too, and not just because they’re 4-8. This was their first game since the national sideshow of playing without a quarterback, and this is a young group in a race to become what it believes before patience from fans and the front office run dry.
The Broncos will miss the playoffs this season for the fifth time in a row; the Chiefs thought so little of clinching a sixth consecutive appearance that they did not mention it in the post-game locker room.
So it’s true that the Chiefs will have to play better against better teams to achieve their goals, and it’s true that they will play a better team this week against the Dolphins, and again after that against the Saints.
Those flaws will face tougher stress tests, particularly if the Chiefs remain stuck behind the Steelers and have to play in the first round as the No. 2 seed.
But now we can circle back a bit, and reference Reid’s comment at the top. Maybe in past years, that would be a fatal flaw, or at least a major problem.
This group — whether they win the Super Bowl or not — has shown it can win in different ways, from different angles, and with different scores.
“I feel like we’re built for it,” safety Tyrann Mathieu said. “Obviously, I think we’re built to beat teams by three scores, too. But when we get in these tight games we’re comfortable. I think we understand what we have to do to kind of pull ourselves through.”
They’ll need to play better than they did against the Broncos. But they won’t need to compete harder. That’s been an easy thing to miss about this group.
They made themselves famous with touchdowns that look like magic tricks, but they made themselves champions by winning these moments they used to lose.
This story was originally published December 7, 2020 at 12:16 AM.