How the Kansas City Chiefs went from season on brink to verge of AFC’s top playoff seed
Previously transcendent and shatterproof Patrick Mahomes abruptly and inexplicably was “broken.” Or, shazam, had been figured out.
It was time for defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo to go, his unit an irredeemable disaster sabotaging the entire operation.
The overhauled offensive line was overmatched. And all of a sudden, a team that seldom had been sloppy with the football was on a slapstick turnover binge and dropped-pass spree.
Seven games into the season, the Chiefs looked lethargic, slipshod and rudderless, the epitome of a team in the throes of a supposed Super Bowl hangover since getting skunked 31-9 by Tampa Bay.
When they trudged off the field after a 27-3 pummeling by the Titans in Nashville, the most lopsided defeat of the Mahomes Era, their season appeared on the very edge of a cave-in.
Even if you tried to remember that every season is a story unto itself and about adapting and improving week to week …
Even if you understood that the indomitable Mahomes wasn’t as far off as some had perceived and surely was mounting his counter-attack …
Even if you were cognizant of Spagnuolo’s track record of coaxing improvement during the season and might have sensed the offensive line would take a while to gel …
It looked bleak and struck us as in the moment as a sort of end of the innocence. After all, as Mahomes put it afterward, everything had been “kind of rainbows and flowers and awesome” the past few years. And now … how could this be?
“When you want to build something substantial, something great,” Mahomes added at the time, “you’re going to go through parts like this.”
In the moment, that sounded more like a rationalization than a revelation for a team fans could at best hope would salvage a wild-card playoff berth.
But more than two months later, as the Chiefs (11-4) have gone from a season on the brink to the verge of clinching the top playoff seed in the AFC on Sunday at Cincinnati (9-6), that seems as good a place as any to start with how they’ve gone on to win eight straight games since then.
Somehow, the Oct. 24 fiasco in Nashville stands as the dividing line of the season, a day the Chiefs hurtled to the depths … but improbably began thrusting back up.
While it commenced in less-than-convincing form by grinding out a 20-17 victory over the New York Giants (4-11), the Chiefs have created a compelling case that they are once again the team to beat as they seek their fourth straight No. 1 seed and the bye and home-field advantage that come with it.
Like any so-called line in the sand, really, this one remains subject to the tides or whims of the winds — such as injuries, the ever-looming threat of COVID-19 and sheer reversals of fortune.
Nevertheless, this reboot wasn’t mere happenstance. The reasons for this metamorphosis are substantial and numerous, some more glamorous or tangible than others.
Maybe some day we’ll learn about a double-secret team meeting that was the catalyst.
More likely, though, it was more tangible stuff and even the simple day-to-day quest to get better.
Let’s start with the mundane but fundamental point Mahomes made in Tennessee and how he picked up from there when I asked him Wednesday about what comes to mind in the making of this turnabout.
“I think it was just staying with the process, that was the biggest thing,” he said. “No one held their head down, we knew there was a lot of season left, we knew that what we wanted was right in front of us.”
Ho-hum, you might say. But what a difference in conviction it makes amid adversity if you have reason to have faith in all the elements at hand and those around you … starting with organizational harmony embodied in coach Andy Reid.
“There’s no panic in Andy, and it filters right on through,” Spagnuolo said Thursday. “And the next thing is tremendous trust. Andy trusts in us. We trust him. The players trust each other. We trust the players. To me, the trust factor, when you’re going through that, is huge. Believing in what you do, I think our guys did that.”
Much as they believed, it was easy for anyone else to scoff.
But it also was easy to blur the differences between reasons and excuses and easy to forget that at least some past performances, and traits, figured to resonate again with such a nucleus from back-to-back Super Bowl teams still here.
Little by little, essential elements of their makeup the last few years resurfaced.
A team that committed 17 turnovers in those first seven games, and botched a number of scoring opportunities with dropped passes, has committed eight in eight games since then and has enjoyed far firmer hands on the other end of Mahomes’ passes.
A defense that forced just seven turnovers in the first seven games has created 21 in the eight ensuing games as the once-beleaguered defense that gave up 203 points in the first seven games remarkably has surrendered 103 since.
Meanwhile, Mahomes is flourishing anew through an array of obstacles, including defensive curveballs, learning to play with a new and largely young offensive line and the aforementioned oddities of dropped passes … and nearly half his interceptions first caroming off his own targets.
Tyreek Hill (104 catches, 1,197 yards) and Travis Kelce (83 catches, 1,006 yards) remain as dynamic a duo of targets as there is in the game, and the line has morphed from somewhat retrograde into road-graders who also are more in sync with Mahomes’ distinct movements.
“We’ll turn on film sometimes and see games from earlier in the season, and it kind of feels like it was two years ago, just because of how much I feel we’ve improved as a group,” rookie center Creed Humphrey said Friday. “Not just physically improved but also mentally improved and being on the same page.”
Fueling all this is that combination of patience and trust, sure, but also the constant churn to adapt and get better, the sort of subtle, behind-the-scenes things that are hard to see … until they’re impossible to miss.
Meanwhile, fortune and health play into that.
Lost in the exasperation of the early weeks and the misguided notion of moving Chris Jones to defensive end and the largely ineffectual pass rush and, thus, more pass coverage issues, was that the Chiefs rarely had their full complement on defense.
Star safety Tyrann Mathieu missed the opener. Defensive end Frank Clark missed three of the first seven games … and now is playing as well as he has in his time with the Chiefs. Jones missed two of the first six games, and cornerback Charvarius Ward missed four of the first six. Linebacker Anthony Hitchens, a key to defensive communication, missed two of the first eight games.
Every team goes through injuries, of course, and no one of those should have been crippling. But the cumulative effect was part of a disconnect, and the curious decision to wait and wait and wait to replace safety Daniel Sorensen with Juan Thornhill was a fundamental mistake.
Those changes and general returns to health, and the blossoming of cornerback L’Jarius Sneed and emergence of Willie Gay and Nick Bolton, were crucial to the resurgence.
But one other development in particular speaks all at once to how the Chiefs have changed on the field and the way sheer fortune has turned for them.
A day after the Chiefs eked out that win over the Giants, relentless general manager Brett Veach traded a sixth-round draft pick to Pittsburgh for veteran defensive end Melvin Ingram.
For whatever reason, Ingram “no longer wanted to be here,” as Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin told local reporters last week, adding, “We prefer volunteers as opposed to hostages.”
The Chiefs preferred a stalwart force to anchor their line, one that crucially allowed Jones to move back inside and was as important as anything in setting this defense back on its axis.
So now, at least entering this game on Sunday, this team is back on trajectory to what could be more “rainbows and flowers and awesome.” If so, we’ll always look back to what happened at and after Tennessee — where a loss in 2019 proved a springboard to eight straight wins and the franchise’s first Super Bowl triumph in 50 years.
This is a journey all its own, of course, and one still in the making.
But it’s worth appreciating now in how it’s unfolded from where it seemed headed … and in what that suggests about the possibilities from here on out.