The Road To Glory II: Part I

Detroit Lions 21, Kansas City Chiefs 20

Football is such a weird fucking game. The defending champion Kansas City Chiefs lost on opening night to the Detroit Lions and now I am already preparing myself for the onslaught of text messages I’m going to receive to remind me of this fact and having to go to work tomorrow so anyone and everyone can remind me of this fact. But so it is. It is a fact. The Chiefs lost to the Lions.

I am not big on making excuses. I think that is one of my favorite things about myself. When I am in the wrong I am the first person to say so. In my youth I used to bargain, and negotiate, with my teachers on what my punishments should be whenever I spoke out of turn or no doubt spoke up to say something disrespectful and unbecoming of a 3rd grader, or a middle schooler, or a high school student. I never liked getting in trouble, per se, but whenever I inevitably did I thought the punishment would be less severe if I provided a mea culpa and moved forward with the business of what was to happen next.

When it comes to the NFL I have no control over the outcomes, but I do have control crafting the narrative of what is to come. See, so many fans of football teams go out of their way to blame the referees for making bad calls, or saying that if such-and-such player wasn’t injured then the outcome of the game would have gone a different way. I’ve heard enough of that over the years to know how lame and annoying it all sounds, so it’s not something that I do. Football happens. It happened tonight to be sure. The Chiefs lost a football game to the Lions. That’s all that happened.

Yes, it is true that Travis Kelce — Kansas City’s top playmaker and Patrick Mahomes’s favorite target — did not play. Chris Jones, whom I referenced at length in the pseudo-preview article I wrote a few days ago, did not play because he is still holding out. Those are legitimately the two-best non-quarterback players who are under contract with the Chiefs. Had either, or both, of them been participants in Thursday night’s game against the Lions there is a near-100 percent chance Kansas City would have won the game. Neither of them did, so the Chiefs didn’t.

Alas, it is only Week 1. Had this been a playoff game I would clearly be taking the loss more in a much less philosophical way, but it’s one game and even in spite of Kelce and Jones’s absences, currently owning the worst record in the league, things like that, Kansas City had every opportunity to win and should have won. The defense, which I wrote at length would be at an obvious disadvantage without Jones on the field, played terrifically and only allowed 14 points. The other touchdown came when Patrick Mahomes threw a perfect pass that went right through Kadarius Toney’s hands and ended up as a pick-six for the Lions.

Offensively, it was not all that pretty. Travis Kelce is the engine of the offense in similar ways to Jones on defense — given how he frees up every other receiver on the field — and if we learned anything tonight it’s that Kansas City is frankly not good enough at their skill positions to win without him. The goat of this game, and I don’t mean “goat” in the Greatest Of All Time sense that everyone else uses it but more so the goat that is classically referred to as the scapegoat that the village casts off to explain the failures and misdeeds of everyone else, is the aforementioned Kadarius Toney. Nothing good happened when the ball touched his hands. I don’t know what his own injury situation looked like, but based on tonight’s performance he had no business being on the field.

It will be a little time before the final numbers come out, but Chiefs receivers dropped a lot of passes tonight. It just wasn’t their game. That’s honestly the long and the short of everything I have written up to this point.

That’s the NFL, though. Losing to the Lions absolutely counts, and at the same time it is only one game. In ten days the Chiefs are going to play the Jaguars, and the Jaguars are really good. The Jaguars lost to the Chiefs in the playoffs last year, so they will have some payback on their minds. It is always tough to take an L, but it’s also the motivation that drives great teams to do better the next time around.