Kansas City Chiefs 41, Chicago Bears 10
As nice as it is to take a breath and enjoy a nice easy 41-10 win, we didn’t learn anything about the Chiefs on Sunday. With games upcoming against the Jets (1-2), Vikings (0-3) and Broncos (0-3), the likeliest scenario is that Kansas City will find itself in a familiar 5-1 spot heading into Week 7’s contest against the Los Angeles Chargers.
The Chiefs put the Bears away early on Sunday afternoon. They led 34-0 at halftime and capitalized early on in the second half to make it 41-0, with Chicago’s only points coming after Kansas City’s first unit defense got taken out.
Kansas City Chiefs 23, New York Jets 20
The Chiefs play these weird games against clearly inferior opponents like five times every season. They usually win them — because they usually win, period — but the end-of-game scenarios materialize as carbon copies of one another almost without fail. Sometimes Kansas City falls behind by 10 or 14 points and squeeze out a field-goal win; sometimes they jockey back and forth and make a big defensive play in the waning moments to pull out a victory; in this one they came out hot, took a 17-0 lead in the first quarter, and allowed the Jets to tie it at 20-20 before putting the clamps down.
Always, though, seemingly always, anyway, it’s Patrick Mahomes with the ball in his hands, and the Chiefs offense on the field, when the game is being decided. That has to be the most frustrating aspect of being a fan of another team and watching Mahomes win games late in the fourth quarter. That he isn’t really doing anything all that spectacular. He had one of the worst statistical outings of his entire career in the 23-20 win over the Jets. He played poorly enough to make the other side, or casual observers who root for the underdog in general, have hope. Then finally when the game was on the line he put the hammer down to remind everyone who he is.
The Chiefs are very good at what they do and are masters of saying the right things, after games have been decided, about the teams they play. The rolodex of clichés are basically engrained in everyone who steps in front of a microphone at this point. ‘That’s a well-coached team over there,’ and ‘We knew we had our work cut out for us,’ or ‘That’s a great team we just played.’ With boring regularity over the last five years the Chiefs have made a show out of the most competitive sport on the planet, making it look so easy at times, but they happen to also be very gracious after they win. I don’t know what that means, it’s just something I notice and appreciate.
Because at the heart of this quasi-dynastic run the Chiefs are in the middle of, they display through their performance week-to-week which teams they respect and which teams they do not respect. The now 1-3 New York Jets were obviously one of the handful on their schedule who they don’t respect. I don’t mean in the way that the Chiefs don’t respect their talent, I mean that they — the Chiefs — were going to win that game 98 times out of 100, and it did not require their A-plus focus to achieve it. They knew the game was over when they took a 17-0 lead, took their veritable feet off of the veritable gas, and when the Jets put a mild scare in them by virtue of tying the game at 20-20 the defense did not allow another score and Patrick Mahomes more or less moved the ball as far as he needed to to generate points.
I know this sounds kind of abstract; a lot of layman NFL fans watch games and see final scores and think to themselves that it basically boiled down to a coin flip. That is not what last night’s contest was about. Instead it was a classic Chiefs game: Kansas City came out driven and at attention, took a 17-0 lead, and realized then that the game was already over. Afterwards Mahomes threw a couple interceptions, the offense went into a lull, and then the team woke up again when they had to win the game.
Again, there are no advanced metrics to quantify what it is I mean to say. I am speaking only of patterns having watched this specific Chiefs team play this very specific style of game so many times. The opponents they respect do not allow them to go to sleep for three quarters at a time, because Kansas City knows they can’t and expect to win. The Jets stink. They were 9.5-point underdogs playing on their home field for a reason.
Alas, there is no perfect marriage — with regard to having incredible talent and pinpoint focus at all times — in the NFL. There are talented teams whom we wonder underachieve seemingly year after year. There are teams with less talent who happen to overachieve year after year. And there are the Chiefs, who annually appear to be in their own category.
Kansas City Chiefs 27, Minnesota Vikings 20
I was highly skeptical about this game against the Vikings for a multitude of reasons. In whatever order: (1) Last week I bet the Vikings +6.5 points, and by game time I knew I made a great bet because the spread got bet all the way down to Vikings +3.5 — a gigantic three-point move over the course of like seven days. It just felt like the perfect opportunity for the Chiefs to lose the game outright, against a fairly meaningless NFC opponent.
(2) My attention was kind of divided due to the fact that my favorite baseball team, the Texas Rangers, whom I used to have a crazy very hands on relationship with, are for some reason playing smack dab in the middle of an American League Division Series against the Baltimore Orioles. There were all sort of scenarios where both the Chiefs and Rangers lost, but given that the Rangers are playing a much higher-stakes affair I would have been OK with Kansas City taking an L if it meant Texas would get a win. I’m philosophical like that. (The Rangers ended up winning 11-8 and now have a 2-0 series lead in the best-of-five with Baltimore.)
(3) This was the first Sunday of the NFL season that I took off from work. It’s Week 5 for Christ’s sake. And let’s be honest: historically the Chiefs do not have a good track record in games they play when I am home watching them in my living room. Pursuant to that, yes, I was home for the Thursday Night season opener against the Lions in which Kansas City lost, 21-20. It’s like a thing for me to take occasional Sundays off during the football season simply to watch my favorite team lose.
With all of that said, the Chiefs won. And the Rangers won. Days like this normally don’t happen for me. I mean, of course, I think I’m kind of a unicorn insofar as being a Kansas City Chiefs fan, a Texas Rangers fan, a Virginia Tech football fan, a Duke University basketball fan, all while being from Southern California. That specific combination of teams is not supposed to exist. But aside from the fucking Dodgers or whatever I don’t have any sort of emotional connection to California sports teams and that’s just me and my contrarianism from coming of age in the sports world in the late-1990’s.
The Chiefs are 4-1; a few weeks ago when they beat the Bears I wrote, briefly, that they’ll probably end up being 5-1 before they play the Chargers two weeks from now. This was all expected. I lost my bet on the Vikings, I didn’t anticipate the Rangers making any noise in the MLB playoffs, and yet I am here right now. The Road To Glory is a long and winding one — as was proven last year — but I don’t think you would find any arguments from me if before the season you told me Kansas City, or I, personally, emotionally, spiritually, would be where we are right now.
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