When it matters most, Chiefs’ defense & playoff DNA should serve them well at Buffalo
If you recall what the 2023 Chiefs regular season felt like in real time, it was easy to be distressed by all that was going awry. And even become consumed with all that they were not. So much so that those traits and trends and fan paranoia, no doubt, still lurk.
Perhaps that feeling was tamped down some after their AFC Wild Card weekend romp over Miami but not likely purged out of mind as the Chiefs prepare to travel to Buffalo to take on the Bills on Sunday.
Because it’s still hard to forget the Chiefs lost more games (six) than ever in the Patrick Mahomes era. And that they dropped more passes than any other team and committed endless crucial penalties.
Sometimes, they bickered on the sidelines and melted down when it mattered most. They were too often undisciplined, at times even appeared disorganized and generally radiated an aura of something just not being right.
Instead of the customary riveting highlight reel, an explanatory video of their regular season would have featured Kadarius Toney’s tip-six against the Lions and Marquez Valdes-Scantling’s late drop against Philadelphia. To add some tone, maybe it would have included the astonishing officiating no-call on Green Bay for interference on MVS.
Perhaps most of all, the telltale tape would be lowlighted by the Buffalo game: the jaw-dropping Mahomes-to-Travis Kelce-lateral-to-Toney negated by the rare offensive offside penalty — and, to borrow from poet Dylan Thomas, the ensuing rage against the dying of the light.
And yet …
While it was hard to discern in the bleak and vexing moments, the defending Super Bowl champions still held uncommon assets and advantages … different as they might look this time around.
If you didn’t even know about Mahomes’ past successes, for instance, you’d have thought of this team a long time ago as one with a championship-caliber defense ... if only the offense could contribute a bit.
As it happens, though, the Mahomes doctrine still holds true: He remains the essential X-factor, particularly in the playoffs.
So for all those pitfalls along the way, the Chiefs now have an intriguing chance to play in a sixth straight AFC Championship Game.
The challenge ahead is beautifully daunting, as it should be: the reckoning with Buffalo featuring Mahomes’ first true postseason road game (unless you count the home-field advantage the Buccaneers enjoyed with Super Bowl LV being held in Tampa Bay.)
Fresh on everyone’s minds will be the 20-17 loss to the Bills last month in Kansas City, and that’s the most relevant past for practical purposes.
But I’ll submit that the Chiefs’ recent postseason victories against Buffalo, particularly the incredible 13-second rally into a 42-36 overtime win, loom as large or larger in the minds of the Bills.
Whether that stuff is for better or worse for the Chiefs — urgent motivation for the Bills or a mental block in the clutch? — remains to be seen. That kind of nemesis past can carry with it a certain self-fulfilling mystique.
At least until it doesn’t any more.
Perhaps more significantly, though, those playoff games among many others remain part of the DNA of these Chiefs, who have back 18 of their 22 starters from their 38-35 Super Bowl LVII victory over the Eagles.
That’s particularly so as it courses through Mahomes, who has the best postseason quarterback rating in NFL history and is 12-3 in the playoffs after the 26-7 victory over Miami. He has a way of meeting the moment that he’s demonstrated over and over and over again.
Moreover, Andy Reid and the Chiefs seem finally to have refined and identified who they are and on whom to lean offensively in their last two full-squad games (sandwiched around resting most starters against the Chargers).
In those two games, against the Bengals and Dolphins, Isiah Pacheco averaged 21 carries. Rashee Rice continued to emerge as the undisputed key complement to Kelce in the passing game:
His eight catches for 130 yards on Saturday, a Chiefs rookie postseason record, made for his second straight 100-yard-plus game. Tellingly, he was targeted 12 times to Kelce’s 10; no other player was targeted more than three times.
While the red-zone mediocrity continues, the Chiefs also have been able to make playing complementary football a strength. And not just in the sense that Harrison Butker made six field goals against the Bengals and four against the Dolphins.
It’s because they recognize that the Steve Spagnuolo-engineered defense is the most staunch part of this team. In the most simple terms, it finished second in the NFL in points allowed (16.1) and put an exclamation point on that by holding high-scoring Miami (atop the NFL at 33.9 points a game) to one measly touchdown.
None of which assures anything against the Bills.
The Chiefs’ self-inflicted issues could resurface, even do them in, and certain bounces and calls (or non-calls) can tilt everything.
But it’s all a reminder that this remains a team with every chance to get back to the AFC Championship Game and give itself an opportunity to become the first NFL team to repeat as champion in nearly two decades.
It took a while, longer than seemed reasonable, to get this more right.
But like my dad used to say, you can fool an Armenian once, you can fool an Armenian twice, but you can’t fool an Armenian indefinitely.
And now is the time that matters.
Reid is among a handful of the best coaches in NFL history, offensive-minded no less, so small wonder he’s sorted something out even in the flux of the season with this generational quarterback.
It’s nuanced and still a work in progress, of course, with the signature challenges ahead.
But couple that with an elite defense, and it’s easier now to see what the Chiefs still have and what can yet be than what they have lacked.
Buffalo may not be the ultimate measure of that. But this much is certain: Sunday will go a much longer way toward defining this season than any of the regular-season blunders and curiosities that made it easy to suspect, even expect, the worst.
This story was originally published January 16, 2024 at 6:45 AM.