They beat the Giants, but KC Chiefs are still struggling. And here comes the hard part
Here comes Andy Reid up two steps to the lectern, and he has to know the Chiefs just showed themselves to be bad and lucky, which beats bad and unlucky and, on this night, was enough to beat the Giants.
But this is no way to go through a Super Bowl chase, which is how this season has always been framed, which sounds somewhere between delusional and from another world by now.
The Chiefs beat the Giants 20-17 at Arrowhead Stadium on Monday. That score was a play or two from being reversed, and if the Chiefs lost to the rotten Giants then this conversation would be a lot different.
So, just remember: This is the positive version of this conversation.
“Listen, everything’s not beautiful right now,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “But we’re fighting through that.”
That was the message Reid tried hard to present. And he did fine with the words, as far as that goes, but he also knows the words don’t matter nearly as much as what we see during games, week after week, essentially halfway through a season that’s been disappointing so far and is about to get much more difficult.
Reid will be a legend in Kansas City forever. He turned the Chiefs from dysfunctional and incompetent to the first Super Bowl championship in 50 years. That’s locked. That’s in stone. Can’t be rewritten.
But that doesn’t mean that his story here is complete. Because there can’t be a single person involved with the Chiefs who will consider one championship with this core an unquestionable success. Patrick Mahomes is too good for that. Same with many of his teammates.
Reid, too.
The 2021 Chiefs share few of the defining traits of their most recent predecessors. They have bursts of disorganization. They’ve been wholly uncompetitive twice. They’ve appeared poorly prepared two weeks in a row now, which is a first.
Reid hoards blame and he deflects credit. That’s how he’s always been, perhaps most clearly illustrated by his response when asked how he divides play calls with his offensive coordinators: he called the ones that worked, I called the ones that didn’t. It’s Leadership 101, and it’s part of what makes him both respected and successful.
But it’s also the real world right now, because if Mahomes and Reid shared most of the credit as the Chiefs rose from contenders to champions they should wear the most blame as 2021 remains stuck in the mud.
“I’m going to go back and look at whether I was putting him in a good position to make plays,” Reid said. “We’ll see. I thought he did a nice job of hanging with it.”
Mahomes played the worst game of his career in a blowout loss against the Titans and was only marginally better against a Giants team that entered ranked 24th in points-against. Some throws were inaccurate, other plays had no chance. The offense lacked rhythm. Much of that is on the coach.
Reid’s team is underperforming as much as any in the league, with the possible exception of the Dolphins. For eight games they’ve shown themselves to be erratic, disjointed and inconsistent. For the next three games they can show themselves to be something more.
Because as the early losses piled — the fumble in Baltimore, the turnovers against the Chargers, the beatdowns against the Bills and Titans — this next three-game stretch emerged as the defining moment of the Chiefs’ season.
They have the league’s toughest remaining schedule, and much of that muscle comes between now and Thanksgiving — the 7-1 Packers here on Sunday, the 5-2 Raiders in Las Vegas the next week, and the 6-1 Cowboys here after that.
We have not seen the Chiefs play well enough to beat a representative effort from any of those teams. Now the big test comes on a short week.
No sport encourages overreactions like the NFL. We don’t need to go back far to see that with the Chiefs — the 2019 season was stuck a few times before taking off in Mexico City, and the DYNASTY headlines were ready for Super Bowl LV.
“Things aren’t as smooth right now as maybe it was (in the past),” Reid said. “But we’ll get it there. We just gotta keep working, and evaluate the world.”
So while it’s true that the Chiefs have given us no reason to believe they can navigate the next three weeks successfully, this is the same league in which the Jets just beat the Bengals, and where the Chargers haven’t won in nearly a month.
But what’s coming into focus is that the Chiefs aren’t just writing the story of the rest of their 2021 season.
They’re also writing a story that will be remembered much longer, about what happened with Reid and Mahomes after they won a Super Bowl and almost another. This was supposed to be the NFL’s next superpower.
Right now, the best we can say is that they’ll have a chance to play against a few superpowers in the next three weeks. These are the moments in which memories are made.
This story was originally published November 2, 2021 at 12:49 AM.