One stat defined Chiefs’ plummet — and there’s good and bad news about that ahead
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Chiefs fell from dynasty contention to 6-10 in 2025 after Mahomes injury.
- One-score game record reversed: 1-8 this season after 17-game streak.
- Run game slump, dropped passes and fewer takeaways magnified the slide.
A year ago, the Chiefs were well along the path to their fifth Super Bowl in six seasons and fulfilling a quest to become the first franchise to win three in a row.
By the time they’d beaten Buffalo in the AFC Championship Game to earn a berth in Super Bowl LIX against Philadelphia, they’d won 23 of their previous 24 games started by Patrick Mahomes.
Then came the shocking fiasco in New Orleans, a 40-22 loss to the Eagles. And what seemed most probably was a blip ultimately dominoed into the disillusioning 2025 season that will come to a merciful end on Sunday in Las Vegas.
Now, the Chiefs (6-10) have lost 11 of their last 17 games. And if they somehow fall to the Raiders, a 2-14 shambles the Chiefs dissected back in the fleeting fool’s-gold phase of this season, they will have lost as many games this season itself (11) as they did in their last three combined.
Quite a plummet, and some raw numbers reveal a lot about its dynamics.
The Chiefs’ sluggish running game (ranked 23rd in the NFL) left too much on the considerable shoulders of Mahomes, who suffered a season-ending knee injury in a Week 15 loss to the Chargers. The Chiefs’ 29 dropped passes this year is tied for the third-most in the league.
Kansas City’s defense is in the top 10 (sixth) in points allowed for the sixth time in seven years, but it’s just 28th in takeaways (12) and 21st in sacks, with 32 — half as many as the league-leading Broncos.
But one stat above all others — and how it came to be — illuminates the reversal of KC’s trajectory more than anything else:
When the Chiefs beat the Bills 32-29 in that AFC title game a year ago, it was the 12th time that season they prevailed in a one-score game. That victory extended their NFL-record streak in such games to 17.
This season, they’re 1-8 in one-score games.
In the process, what long seemed like an angel on their shoulder — the charmed Chiefs — morphed into their nemesis.
As much as we want to assume that contrast directly reflects the difference between remarkable teams the last few seasons and this worrisome dud, it’s not quite that simple.
And there’s both good and bad news in that for Chiefs fans.
Because of all the things that weren’t sustainable about this run, maybe there was nothing more so than this team’s penchant for winning close games — even as it seemed to become a living, breathing part of Mahomes and company.
Thinking about the pendulum careening back the other way reminded me of something from an interview about five years ago, as the Chiefs were seeking to repeat after winning their first Super Bowl in 50 years.
For a column on the psychology of the repeat, I spoke with old friend Richard 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.”
And he said something that stuck with me about the hard statistical truth of returning to the pinnacle up against what might be considered the gravitational pull of regression to the mean.
“When the absolute winner is declared, they’re there on the basis of being really good, plus chance events,” he said. “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.”
So as flawed as these Chiefs have been, and this doesn’t change that at all, their plunge in 2025 also is all about coming face to face with the inevitable other side of that equation.
One that includes sheer bounces, the roulette wheel of injuries, how iffy penalty calls are assessed and plenty else often beyond the Chiefs’ control.
That opposite end of all this was a grim reality for a long time for the Chiefs, embodied in the mere names of the likes of Dee Ford, Andrew Luck and Marcus Mariota and such officiating malpractice as the “forward progress” call against Derrick Johnson. Etc.
By and large in the Mahomes Era, there had been a sense of purging those sorts of star-crossed trends. Cataloging that would take more space than we have here, so let’s just look at the most recent past.
Including their 25-22 overtime win over the 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII, the Chiefs won by one-score margins in five of their last six games in the 2023 season before winning a dozen times that way last year.
The tendency came with all manner of quirks, really, including but not limited to: a Ravens receiver landing a toe or so out of the end zone; a Raiders center snapping the ball off Aidan O’Connell while the quarterback was looking away, with Vegas in game-winning field-goal range and the Chiefs’ third kicker of the season (Matthew Wright) doinking a ball off the left upright for a last-play game-winning field-goal try against the Chargers.
The trait became so prevalent that it was easy to see it as somewhere between fate and the Chiefs making their own luck. Not so much through the specific turns that could only be considered quirky, but by making the plays to get to those plays and other last-chance moments … or the other team simply not making plays when needed.
It seemed to reflect a collective mindset, especially entering the playoffs.
“There’s a difference between ‘I think I can’ and ‘I know I can,’” Murray State psychology professor Dan Wann, a longtime Chiefs fan, told me earlier this year. “The Chiefs more than any other team in the NFL have the ‘I know I can’ and confidence.
“With confidence comes success. There’s no better predictor of success than confidence. And the beauty of it is, there’s no better predictor of confidence than success.”
True as that was then, it didn’t preclude the other elements at play — or guarantee it would continue going forward.
No matter how much one (me, anyway) could argue that what didn’t kill them was making them stronger, no doubt the Chiefs certainly were living on the edge.
Just how thin that margin was got exposed through all sorts of “chance events” this time around.
From receiver Rashee Rice being suspended six games to tackle Josh Simmons disappearing publicly without explanation for a month; from tight end Travis Kelce’s resurgent season being marred by two pivotal deflections into interceptions to defensive lineman Chris Jones’ three vital late-game mistakes; from endless untimely penalties to multiple missed chances at interceptions on deflections …
It all led to the other end of the spectrum.
The preferred solutions, of course, are ones that will minimize the amount of times it comes down to that late-game crucible of one-score decisions.
But more likely in a league that strives to create parity through everything from the salary cap to draft order to scheduling, how the Chiefs respond to this season will depend a lot on how girded they are to control more overall ... especially late in games to come.
Because chance events will remain just that — something the Chiefs have experienced from both extremes, but also something that figures to settle somewhere in between over time. And that’s a decidedly mixed blessing for a franchise that had prospered so much by it, only to be done in by it this season.