Three keys to keeping the Kansas City Chiefs on track, starting with the NFL Draft
The following is a complete list of NFL teams with more regular season wins than the Chiefs in the last three seasons:
______.
The following is a complete list of NFL teams with more playoff wins than the Chiefs in the last three seasons:
______.
This is the Patrick Mahomes Effect — the benefit of employing a raspy-voiced cheat code. His talents are enhanced by a strong coaching staff and dynamic teammates, with all sides helping the others look better.
The Chiefs are the consensus betting favorite for Super Bowl LVI, and currently own the highest over-under win total by Vegas bookmakers.
Life moves fast, and we now live in a world in which the franchise previously known for being just barely good enough to smash your soul in the postseason is now the NFL’s safest bet. There is not a single human employed by the Chiefs right now who will consider any future without multiple Super Bowl championships a resounding success.
It can feel like this is inevitable, particularly after trading for left tackle Orlando Brown on Friday.
But the Chiefs are not the first team whose dynasty felt inevitable, only the latest, and instead of going through the whole list, how about we shorthand the scariest precedent?
The Seattle Seahawks smashed the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, and when they made it again the next year’s Super Bowl was presented as their chance to begin a dynasty by ending the Patriots’ dynasty.
Narrator: They did not.
The Seahawks didn’t give it to Marshawn Lynch at the goal line, and haven’t been past the divisional round of the playoffs since. We can — and others have — blame this on a number of factors. The drafts haven’t been good enough, free-agency contracts not efficient enough, injuries clustered, the offensive line has struggled, and there have been varying forms of drama within the facility.
The Chiefs can still be the Patriots, with more rings than fingers on one hand. They can also still be the Seahawks, with more questions than answers and a future Hall of Fame quarterback who should’ve won more Super Bowls.
Here, then, we present the three most important factors for the Chiefs to be more of what they believe they can be and less of what the modern history of the NFL says every team except the Patriots becomes.
We’re skipping the continued health of Patrick Mahomes, because that’s too obvious.
1. The draft classes have to be better
There’s a reason we’re doing this column just days before the 2021 NFL Draft, and let us be clear: The Chiefs’ drafts haven’t been bad, particularly when considering that barring an unlikely trade back into the first round the highest the Chiefs will have picked in the 2018, 2019, 2020 or 2021 drafts is 32nd overall.
L’Jarius Sneed was the league’s biggest value-over-round selection in 2020, Juan Thornhill is a potential star and Derrick Nnadi is a long-term starter. But the Chiefs need more.
Breeland Speaks was cut after two seasons, and for various reasons Willie Gay Jr., Dorian O’Daniel and Khalen Saunders have not made significant impact on defense. Mecole Hardman has had some moments, and Clyde Edwards-Helaire had a better rookie season than general perception, but the Chiefs would’ve expected bigger impacts from both.
A different way of saying it: The Chiefs’ recent drafts look like a cumulative C+ or so, when the club needs a grade better.
By next season, five players are scheduled for cap hits totaling $130 million, according to Spotrac. Mahomes will always be money well spent, and the Chiefs will likely cut or restructure Frank Clark after 2021, but their current payroll is among the league’s most top-heavy.
Some of this is a good problem because Mahomes, Chris Jones, Tyreek Hill, Travis Kelce and Tyrann Mathieu are the types of stars who push championships.
But the only way this works is if there is a steady influx of young and cheap players outperforming their rookie contracts.
Otherwise you become the Eagles, or Rams.
2. Efficiency in free agency
There are some similarities here with the above reasoning, and indeed these things work in harmony. The most obvious example is that the Chiefs traded their 2018 first-round pick in a package for Mahomes, and their 2019 first-round pick in a package for Clark.
The Clark trade will be debated forever and will be impossible to shorthand. He has vastly underperformed the resources spent to acquire him, and yet he’s among a handful of players without whom the Chiefs would not have won the Super Bowl.
The truth is the Chiefs could afford to overspend for Clark (and Sammy Watkins) because they had so many other bargains. Mahomes, Hill, and Jones cost less than $9 million combined against the cap during the Super Bowl championship season. Those three are scheduled to cost $31.8 million in 2021, and $85.9 million in 2022.
The Chiefs have been smart with free agency. Tyrann Mathieu and Anthony Hitchens are critical parts of the defense’s turnaround. Watkins made two of the most important postseason plays in franchise history. Alex Okafor, Bashaud Breeland, Mike Pennel and others have proved valuable.
Particularly as the salary cap grows in coming years, free agency will once again prove to be a pricey but effective way to fill holes. The Chiefs tried to do that with left tackle Trent Williams, and may still do it with Alejandro Villanueva or Russell Okung.
Going forward, the Chiefs’ shopping strategy must adjust. Their opportunities for major purchases will be fewer and the margin for error heightened.
Missing out on Williams and some receivers is not a rejection, but it is evidence that free agents aren’t as motivated to join the Chiefs as the homegrown talent has been to accept cap-friendly structured extensions.
Not that they need it, but Andy Reid’s ending in Philadelphia is likely to make the Chiefs even more careful here. He’s said that he took on too much personnel responsibility, and it’s been said that too many free agents overtook the Eagles’ culture.
3. No destructive drama
There is some chicken-and-egg stuff here. Who can say whether a team stopped winning because of clashing egos, or whether the egos clashed because a team stopped winning?
Thousands of words can (and have) been written about these situations, perhaps most notably about the Seahawks and Packers.
The Chiefs are well-insulated here. Reid and the front office have been deliberate about this. It’s part of why they traded Marcus Peters before the 2018 season, to clear the deck for Mahomes’ leadership. It’s part of why they signed Mathieu, a selfless and relentless teammate and one of the league’s most respected players.
But the Chiefs’ goal is sustained success and multiple championships, which is the equivalent of swimming upstream against the NFL’s currents of parity.
The challenges are more long-term than short, and to illustrate the point think about this: Who on the current roster would you expect to still be a star in five years?
Mahomes is obvious, but after that it’s tricky. Hill, Mathieu, and Chris Jones will all be in their 30s. Kelce is already there.
This is the challenge, to transition one championship nucleus to the next, and we usually see that in terms of roster building. But the tightrope can thin as stars age. Cap space, targets and opportunities can become less plentiful and the team-over-self culture that coaches work so hard to build can be tested.
Again: This part is not a short-term worry. The Chiefs have an excellent room. But rosters change constantly, and maintaining that excellence in the room will go a long way in growing their excellence on the field.
You can know the front office is keeping that in mind this week.
This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM.