The secret of the rest of the Kansas City Chiefs’ season is that there is no secret
We’re all dumb. Is that too harsh?
Let’s try another way: We don’t know as much as we think, and we sometimes confuse what we feel for what we know.
One thing we do waaayyyy too much is become captive to the moment. There is a human tendency to see current trends as permanent, and extrapolate a projected end result based on what just happened.
We do one consistent week at the gym, or have one bad day at the office, or one weird interaction with a neighbor and we think we’re in a new reality.
There might not be a place in society that we do this more than sports.
I’ll start: Before this season, I took one part Mahomes’ record against the Ravens, two parts their relatively secure wins over the Bills last year and three parts offseason Browns hype, stirred it all together in my gut, and decided that the Browns were the AFC’s biggest threat to the Chiefs.
Because I’m polite, I’ll pause here until you stop laughing.
Yes, go on. I get it.
OK, yeah. Still going, huh?
Come on. It was one column. Give me a break.
You know what? I don’t care if you’re done laughing. We have to get to the point:
The Chiefs are generating a lot of frustration for fans and criticism from media, and with a win in Las Vegas on Sunday — that’s an if, but still — they will have the same record they had at the same point of the 2019 season.
You probably remember that season ended with a parade.
You’ve probably forgotten some of the things people were saying about them after 10 games that year. Here is an incomplete list:
Colin Cowherd: “I like Kansas City, fun to watch, but it feels like to me they’re set up to get the quarterback MVPs and not rings.”
Bart Scott: “The Chiefs’ defense is soft.”
Kyle Brandt: “They’re not going anywhere.”
Geoff Schwartz: “My brother plays for the Chiefs and I picked the Patriots to win the Super Bowl.”
There was even a guy on the radio — I’m not sure of the fella’s name, but the clip lives on the internet — who said the Raiders had a longer Super Bowl window that the Chiefs.
This is not gotcha journalism. This is not some B-side copy of Old Takes Exposed. This is not meant to embarrass anyone. Everyone named above is smart, studies football and is entitled to his opinion.
The point here is that the entirety of human history is full of examples of our brains overemphasizing current trends for permanence. We’re smart enough to build rockets and gullible enough to believe in the Cowboys. We act like this Chiefs team at 6-4 would be incapable of doing what the last Chiefs team did after a 6-4 start.
Not that the Chiefs themselves are making this a focal point of preparation.
“We spend so much time focusing on getting yourself ready to play,” coach Andy Reid said. “Those things don’t necessarily have an impact.
“It does in the big picture, but when you’re getting ready to play a good football team you want to spend every minute trying to get the scheme down, and get their scheme down, and understand their players. It’s endless hours on that trying to get that done. So I don’t go in that direction.
“The guys, they read all your stuff, so they know.”
That last part was sarcasm — though, just saying, at least some of his players read the tweets — but assuming Reid’s being fully transparent here, it’s an approach that’s entirely in line with how he’s always operated.
Even after retirement, many players still marvel at how Reid was the same guy after a 1-5 start in 2015 that he was during a 9-0 start in 2013. He does not change his routine or mood or tone for outside factors. The work is what matters, and if anything, success brings temptation for losing focus while struggles bring demands for the opposite.
This is another Reid trait: He trusts his guys. He trusts them as men. To be professional. There isn’t a lot of rah-rah from the head coach, in part because he believes the best rah-rah is the rah-rah from player to player.
And he knows those players are adults. They don’t need social media or the news feed on their phone to know what happened two years ago.
But even without it, those who were on that team — including 11 starters from that season’s turning-point loss in Nashville — must know the connections.
Not just the losses. In 2019, the Chiefs’ fourth loss was the fourth time they gave up 30 or more points. This year’s Chiefs have given up 30 or more four times. In 2019, the Chiefs didn’t always run it effectively, or stop the run. They struggled against passes to running backs. They scored a lot of points but could be inconsistent, and for a while it was said the league had figured out Mahomes (back then, it was man defense; now it’s Cover 2).
But the biggest problem with the offense right now is that Mahomes is stuck, right? Over his last three games he’s completing just 57.5% of his throws for 647 yards, two touchdowns, two interceptions and a passer rating of 71.1 Well, in 2019, in Weeks 11 through 13, he completed 59.4% of his passes for 640 yards, three touchdowns, two interceptions and a 79.6 rating.
Maybe this isn’t quite as unfamiliar as it feels in the moment.
We can make a joke here about Chiefs fans still fearing the worst, even after all this success, but the truth is that this isn’t about the Chiefs’ fans, or even sports fans.
It’s about humans.
Daniel Wann is a psychology professor at Murray State. He is also a lifelong fan of Kansas City’s sports teams, and his research has centered on the psychology of sports fandom. His work includes cases showing that fans tend to default toward pessimism, because it’s safer, and that we are often captive to the moment.
“We have this belief that how it is now is how it’s always going to be,” Wann said. “And so when things are going hard, people have a hard time imagining how it’s ever going to get better. And when things are going good, people have a hard time ever imaging how it couldn’t be good.
“Which is funny, because sports fans, unless you have a brand new team it’s always been sometimes good and sometimes bad. It’s like we only concentrate on whatever peak we’re on or whatever valley we’re in.”
So, look. Apologies if you clicked on this space hoping to learn some secret about where this season is going. The point is that nobody knows — and that most notably applies to anyone saying the Chiefs are cooked.
Here is an incomplete list of the things we do know:
The Chiefs have the same number of wins as everyone else in the AFC West, with five of their last eight games against those opponents. They have faced similar situations before and not just won the moment, but won the Super Bowl. A win would at worst put the Chiefs a half-game behind in the division.
We also know the Chiefs have a history of improving during this time of year as other teams fade.
None of this is guaranteed. Which is kind of the point. The Chiefs’ season, in many ways, starts on Sunday night.
This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 11:57 AM.