The Road To Glory II: Part II

Kansas City Chiefs 17, Jacksonville Jaguars 9

The Chiefs entered Week Two as 3-point road favorites against the AFC South favorites, the Jaguars, in a game that featured the highest expected point total of the week — 51 points. The result was a grind-it-out low-scoring slugfest. Kansas City turned the ball over three times, Jacksonville failed to score a touchdown, and ironically the two teams accumulated the fewest combined points (26) in the league.

Driving to work on Sunday with the game playing on the radio, I was reminded why emotionally I am incapable of both (a) having to go to work while the Chiefs are playing and (b) being relegated to listening to them on the radio. It doesn’t make any intellectual sense — since it is an objective fact that I have no control over the outcome — but the neanderthal-brain that has yet to leave me still says I would have some control if I caught the action in front of a television screen while it was happening in realtime. What ended up transpiring, at some point during a ping-ponging of turnovers committed by both sides in the second quarter, was me sitting behind the wheel adjusting the volume as to not get too excited while I practiced some breathing exercises.

Luckily for me, and amazingly in general, the 17-9 win over the Jaguars is the only time all season that Kansas City plays in the 10:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time) time slot. From here on out they have nothing but 1:30 (PST) games and primetime affairs. That means I won’t be subjected to such stresses on my morning drives until at least next year, which puts my odds of surviving this football season about a thousand percent higher than they otherwise would have been.

My only big-picture takeaway from this game, specifically, is what I texted my brothers circa 2:00 in the afternoon after the game was over: “The Chiefs might have a defense!” I did, in my season preview article, where I spent the majority of the post talking about Chris Jones (pictured above as number 95), speculate that “Kansas City has the chance to be one of the 10- or 12-best defensive units in the NFL.” It is only two weeks, but I’ll posit some more that I may have shortchanged them. In two weeks they have surrendered just 23 points to the Lions and Jaguars — two above-average NFL offenses — and I’d argue with Chris Jones looking as sharp as he did while playing on a pitch count, since he missed all of training camp and the preseason due to his holdout, the defense can absolutely be sustainable.

Offensively the Chiefs remain a work-in-progress. The 17 points they produced in Jacksonville were partially misleading; they muffed a punt, fumbled after gaining a first down, and ran out the clock on kneel downs inside the five yard line at the end of the game. They just as easily could have scored 30 points in this game instead of 17. But alas, with how well the defense played, particularly in the red zone, it did not take very much out of the ordinary to procure victory number one on the year.

The truth of this Kansas City Chiefs team will come down to two factors: the first is just how real the defense turns out to be. If the first two weeks are any indication then this has the potential to be the best team of the Patrick Mahomes era. The second is how well the youthful wide receivers turn out to be. With a less-than-100-percent Travis Kelce, who caught four passes for 26 yards and a touchdown, but clearly did not look like himself, the Chiefs have been spreading the ball around at an excessive rate through the first two games. I once believed it was untenable having only Kelce and Tyreek Hill to rely upon; now that I have seen what the other side of that coin looks like, I don’t think it’s possible to have longterm success if they have only Kelce and nobody else.

Last season they found a way to make it work. They relied on Juju Smith-Schuster and he, frankly, isn’t very good. This year they have a collection of guys who could theoretically stand out, from Kadarius Toney to Marquez Valdes-Scantling to Skyy Moore to Rashee Rice. To this point, however, none have received enough volume to make one think that Patrick Mahomes has any trust in them.

But I imagine that is why the defense has been such a revelation through two weeks. I think if Chiefs fans, the non-reactionary ones, anyway, have learned anything it’s that Mahomes and Andy Reid will figure things out. If you had told me before the season that Kansas City would have scored only 38 points through the first two weeks I would have assumed them to be 0-2. If the defense is some sort of a constant, and the offense is not required to bang out 30 points a game for this team to generate wins, then we could be looking at one of the best teams of the last decade.

Every week in the NFL is its own campaign. Every week of my life is its own campaign. There is a certain feel to it. There are highs and lows. There are things that can be learned. I have once again gotten to the point where I can work out four or five days a week; I’m eating again; I’m sleeping again; I have gained something like 20 pounds over the last calendar month. It’s such a cliché to say we’re taking things one day at a time, for NFL players to say they are taking it one game at a time. But that is all that’s happening here. That is life. And so we are constantly if we are lucky moving forward. Always.