On the gap between how the KC Chiefs see themselves, and what they’ve actually shown us
The butt-whipping finally ended. The process of finding answers began.
The Chiefs gave you several hints that the search will be daunting, starting with players immediately searching for their names on Twitter, and the team’s media relations department choosing Nick Bolton and Byron Pringle to help explain this mess.
They were among the few players made available for interviews after Sunday’s loss.
The Chiefs were shellacked 27-3 by the Titans, and we could inventory all of the specific failures on both sides of the ball. But the clearest illustration of how far they are from success might be that coach Andy Reid’s words are starting to run together.
“I’m seeing things that I haven’t seen before,” he said.
The Chiefs are a mess. They went from prohibitive Super Bowl favorites to bumbling incoherence with staggering efficiency. One way of being more descriptive would require this newspaper to change its standards of appropriate language.
Another would be to tell you that toward the end of the third quarter, having just passed midfield for the first time, a third-down pass fell incomplete and tight end Travis Kelce’s response was to whine to the officials about a missed call.
Another way would be to tell you that it got worse from there — after the Chiefs’ next drive stalled at the 39, the coaches put the punt team on (because reasons?), then changed their minds and trotted out the field-goal unit (to pull within seven field goals of forcing overtime?), and then called a timeout to avoid a delay-of-game penalty.
The kick was no good, becomes sometimes in life you get what you deserve.
This group stinks, and picking the worst part of the stink is a matter of taste. Reasonable people can disagree here.
Is it something in the details, like a non-existent pass rush despite the presence of two of the league’s highest-paid pass rushers? Or perhaps an offense with enviable star power leading the league in turnovers?
Is it something broader, like an unthinkable family tragedy and a personal-health scare (understandably) taking the edge off Reid’s focus? Or maybe that some regularly visible on-field frustration between players — most regularly dished out by safety Tyrann Mathieu — is a sign of deeper problems, either due to dwindling overall chemistry or defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s loosening grasp of the room?
The closest thing to an explanation came from Patrick Mahomes, when he was asked if there’s a sense of shock in the Chiefs’ locker room, and how he thinks the team can fight through that.
The answer he gave is long, but presented in full it’s the nearest representation of confidence we heard after yet another blowout loss.
“You never go into a game expecting to lose, and lose bad. Definitely you get shocked because you didn’t play the way you wanted to. But we have enough leaders on this team we have to find a way.
“I don’t know what that’s gonna take yet. We’ll talk about it, we’ll figure it out, we’ll watch the film. But I trust we’ll find it. That’s part of leadership — part of great teams — is being able to battle through adversity.
“It’s been kind of rainbows and flowers and awesome for these last few years, but whenever you want to build something substantial and build something great, you’re going to go through parts like this.”
“We keep saying it’s still early in the year. We can still go get whatever we want. But it’s going to take us getting better every single day. Because if you get better every single day, and play each game play by play, I think we have the talent in this locker room that we can make it happen.”
The blurriness comes from divergent perspectives. Because it’s true that Reid’s Chiefs are the NFL’s winningest team over the last seven years, and it’s also true that this core has played in three consecutive AFC Championship Games and the last two Super Bowls.
That kind of foundation should earn the benefit of the doubt. It should build credibility in difficult moments.
But that success is in the past. This group in this season has earned the benefit of squat. Those old successes are not this group’s successes.
If we throw out last season’s Week 17 game, when the Chiefs rested as many of their top players as they could, Reid’s last four teams had lost a total of two games by more than one score. This team has been on the business end of entirely noncompetitive blowouts twice in the last three weeks.
It still seems unfathomable that a group with this much talent and this level of coaching can be this disjointed, but here is an objective truth: The Chiefs’ occasional bursts of brilliance are buried under disorganization.
And individual talent is no match for collective failure.
This group of All-Pros and future Hall of Famers is seven games into a season defined by the habits of bad teams — penalties at the worst moments, way too many turnovers and what appears to be a call for accountability that’s often proclaimed publicly but has not been practiced in reality.
Mahomes is right: The Chiefs can still achieve all of their goals, up to and including another Super Bowl championship.
But he’s also wrong: It’s no longer early in the year.
The Chiefs’ next game will be played in November and they have the league’s worst defense with the most turnovers. Defensive end Frank Clark has one more tackle than Marcus Kemp, and the same number of sacks as a milk carton. The Chiefs’ offense just played its most ineffective game since 2012, and that team got a lot of people fired.
We’re not at that point. Not particularly close, really. This team isn’t good enough for the front office to sacrifice some of its future to push for another championship, but at the same time it’s talented enough to believe there’s still a chance that this was rock-bottom. There’s a chance the season can be saved.
But the cold reality is that this group is seven games into showing the world what it is, which means this group is seven games into showing the world its hind-parts.
The Chiefs stink, and other than talking about how they used to be good, they appear to be fresh out of answers or reasons you should believe.
They like to tell people they’re at their best with their backs against the wall. They said that just recently, actually, and then they showed us their worst.
The gap between what this team thinks it can be and what it’s so far shown itself to be continues to grow.
This story was originally published October 24, 2021 at 5:39 PM.