Even (especially?) with Rodgers out, Packers game will reveal a lot about the KC Chiefs
For nearly 50 years, the Chiefs were plagued by some combination of bad football and bad luck, stuff that sometimes blurs together in such a way that it can be hard to discern where one ends and the other begins.
The story of the franchise from 1970 through 2019 was never-ending anguish in the twin forms of some purely wretched seasons and wrenching postseason losses, games we needn’t remind anyone of beyond the fact that many are memorable for ill twists of fate.
Everything started to change when Andy Reid was hired in 2013 and summoned a 9-0 start after a team in chaos went 2-14 the year before. Even if it was against a largely accommodating schedule against several teams relegated to playing backup quarterbacks because of injuries (at last a break for the beleaguered), the turnaround was monumental. They suddenly seemed to be the Charmed Chiefs.
But Reid also promptly was initiated in the theater of the absurd that marked so many Chiefs postseasons, with the Chiefs bungling a 38-10 lead in Indianapolis punctuated by sheer luck — as in the carom of Donald Brown’s fumble being scooped into a touchdown by quarterback Andrew Luck in what would become a sickening 45-44 loss.
More preposterous postseason heartache awaited, of course, nicely embodied in Marcus Mariota’s touchdown pass to himself in a 22-21 playoff loss to Tennessee in 2018. And then there was, argh, Dee Ford lining up offsides and negating an interception that figured to seal what became an overtime loss to New England in the AFC Championship Game in 2019.
None of which is to absolve them for all the other contributing elements of the losses or the fluky mistakes.
But all of which is also to say that at least in some cosmic sense the Chiefs surely were due some indulgences of fortune these last few years.
And they got many, including but not limited to how they won eight games by six points or fewer on their way back to the Super Bowl last season … and how Patrick Mahomes was able to recover from what appeared to be a devastating knee injury in the 2019 season … and then-Houston coach Bill O’Brien’s call for a fake punt (snuffed out by Daniel Sorensen) with a 24-7 lead in what became a 51-31 Chiefs win in an AFC divisional-round game in 2020.
Without minimizing how they seized the moments and made their own breaks and achieved the unprecedented with three straight comebacks from double-digit deficits to win Super Bowl LIV, this all bears mention in a different context now.
Because symbolized nicely by half of Mahomes’ 10 interceptions ricocheting off of some part of a would-be receiver’s body or equipment, luck has largely smiled the other way in this thus-far unsettling season.
Enough so that it’s easy to think the magic and mojo and swagger is just gone, and that this team seems lost.
Luck sure can be a fickle force, though, not to mention a powerful one.
And with the Chiefs (4-4) at a pivotal point as they prepare to take on Green Bay (7-1) Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium, entering the game they appear to be the beneficiary of a capricious turn of events: Reigning NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers is out after he tested positive for COVID-19, leaving the Packers to start Jordan Love … who has thrown seven NFL passes.
This has the makings of being a major break for the Chiefs, who may or may not prove capable of converting it into what would be their most substantial win yet this season and perhaps even resetting their trajectory.
If they squander the moment and/or this game becomes a Love-fest, then, gulp, maybe this season is destined to become destitute.
At least to this point, though, it still seems a major part of how we perceive them has something to do with random chance … and maybe isn’t entirely about some largely inexplicable plummet into the abyss
Because in the end there is both a discouraging and reassuring reality hovering above it all, something I discussed last season with my longtime friend Rich Keefe, the former director of sports psychology at Duke University and author of a book on the psychology of peak athletic performance called On The Sweet Spot: Stalking The Effortless Present.
For all the human elements at play, there is a sobering statistical truth to understand about how hard it is to stay at the top.
“When the absolute winner is declared, they’re there on the basis of being really good plus chance events,” he said in the weeks before the Chiefs returned to the Super Bowl. “So that means the next year they could be just as good and not have those chance events work out on a couple things and then they fall back.
“So it’s not really that they weren’t as good; they just didn’t have the things going for them that they need to win.”
Now, it’s entirely true that Mahomes is facing the first real funk of his NFL career, marked by producing three of his five lowest career ratings in the last four games. And despite some glimmers of hope with a defense that has played winning football two of the last three games (albeit against teams that are a combined 4-12), that unit hasn’t remotely proven it can be counted on.
But you can’t look at this Chiefs season and not be struck by the improbability of how they lost at Baltimore, with Clyde Edwards-Helaire’s first NFL fumble costing them a chance at the game-winning field goal in a 36-35 loss.
Or not shake your head at the four turnovers they committed in a 30-24 loss to the Chargers.
Or not be conscious of the quirkiness of most of their 19 turnovers, which through a mere eight games already is one more than any Reid-coached Chiefs team has given away in a full season. With the defense only generating eight turnovers, that leaves the Chiefs tied for the worst turnover ratio in the league at minus-11.
That stands out all the more because it’s completely counter to a signature element of the Chiefs under Reid. In his previous eight seasons, they were a cumulative plus-83 in turnover margin.
With the Chiefs also among the most-penalized teams in the NFL with 56 (fifth overall, with the Eagles’ 60 leading the way), it’s easy to develop a narrative that they’ve become sloppy and undisciplined. And at some point, those numbers tell the whole story.
But it’s also true that the penalties aren’t really a new problem for the Chiefs, who were the worst in the NFL when they went to the AFC Championship Game two seasons ago and fourth-worst en route to their Super Bowl encore last season.
What they can’t shrug off, or at least overcome, are the turnovers, which largely have come from previously entirely reliable places. Have they really abruptly been reduced to turnover machines … or is it more a measure of a convergence of freakish snapshots?
They have to improve all over, of course, especially with a pass rush on defense that could be boosted by the newly acquired Melvin Ingram. But the greatest X-factor is the turnovers, which are both the crux of their problems but also part of their prime hopes to reverse what’s been happening and revert to the mean of the Mahomes era … rather than the mean of the previous half century.
And this is where it’s about leadership and the will within, variables that suggest the Chiefs can reverse what’s cursing them.
Because it seems reasonable to believe that a winning culture remains intact inside a locker room that has a core of back-to-back Super Bowl players within it.
And that this group understands such time-honored cliches as the harder you work the luckier you get, and that luck is when preparation meets opportunity, etc.
Now the Chiefs just have to prove they can get back to creating their own luck. Or at least hold onto the football again and take advantage of what seems like a beneficial turn.
How they handle it on Sunday could reveal a lot about whether this team is just a few bounces or twists away from finding itself … or has actually just lost its way after all.
Either way, the difference between bad luck and bad football should be more evident by game’s end.
This story was originally published November 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.