The Road To Glory II: Part V

Kansas City Chiefs 31, Los Angeles Chargers 17

The Chargers have, since Patrick Mahomes became the starting quarterback of the Chiefs in 2018, been the one team that consistently — like seemingly always — plays closely contested games against Kansas City. I get that they’re a divisional opponent and play the Chiefs twice a year and there’s a lot of familiarity and all that. But just look at the final scores between them in that time:

2018
Kansas City 38, @Chargers 28
Chargers 29, @Chiefs 28

2019
Chiefs 24, @Chargers 17
@Chiefs 31, Chargers 21

2020
Chiefs 23, @Chargers 20 (OT)
*Chargers 38, @Chiefs 21

2021
Chargers 30, @Chiefs 24 
Chiefs 34, @Chargers 28 (OT)

2022
@Chiefs 27, Chargers 24
Chiefs 30, @Chargers 27

*This particular game occurred on the last week of the 2020 regular season, where the Chiefs were 14-1 and had already secured a first-round bye in the playoffs and decided to rest all of their starters.

In other words, in games Mahomes has started versus the Chargers he holds — including today’s 31-17 victory — a record of 7-2 and a composite score of 32.2-26.8, a difference of about 5.4 points per game. We’re dealing with a nine-game sample size and thus the outliers, such as today’s 14-point win (along with a couple 10-points wins) skew the results a little bit. In general we are talking about seven out of ten games that were decided by one possession, four that were decided by a field goal (or less), and two that needed overtime to get resolved.

It’s been like a thing during the Justin Herbert era in Los Angeles to play really close games against the Chiefs and lose. His personal record against Kansas City is 2-5, but here again we have to acknowledge (even though the media pretends like it isn’t the case) that against Mahomes he is just 1-5, which feels a lot worse for some reason. Even in the games where he has clearly outplayed the best quarterback in the NFL Herbert has found himself on the sidelines when the game was being decided.

I like Justin Herbert as a player, and he seems like a nice dude in general. But I tend to think of him in the same way I think about one of Southern California’s best fast-food joints — In-N-Out Burger — because it’s both really good and really overrated at the same time. Insofar as NFL quarterbacks are concerned there isn’t very much that differentiates a really good burger from an average one. If I was the general manager of an NFL team and some computer-generated randomizer selected Justin Herbert to be my quarterback I would feel fine about it; I’m just saying he isn’t the type of dude, or burger, I guess you could say, that I would wait 15 or 20 minutes in line for.

When you compare that to Patrick Mahomes, who has won two Super Bowls and two league MVPs and has played on his home field in the AFC Championship Game an unprecedented five years in a row, you see just how wide the chasm is. One of the guys is In-N-Out, and the other is some totally separate almost offensively gaudy monstrosity speckled with unnecessary gold leaf and holy grass-fed cow from the plains of Indonesia or some shit that one would wait in line an eternity for just to say they got to have one bite of it.

I suppose I only say all of this as a way to admit that I was not invested in today’s game like I normally would be for a Chiefs-Chargers game. I think I’ve just, like, seen this movie before. Herbert would do his thing and keep the game relatively close, but Mahomes would do his thing in the end and Kansas City would win. That is the way this works. At no point did I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach like We Really Need A First Down Right Now or whatever. It was 24-17 at halftime. It was 24-17 after three quarters. And it ended 31-17.

I can’t help that, really. I mean, entering the day the Chiefs were 5-1 and the Chargers were 2-3; even with a Kansas City loss they’d be 5-2 and Los Angeles would be 3-3; as it ultimately played out, the spread is large, almost to the point that barring an injury to Patrick Mahomes it’s insurmountable. That’s the word. Just look at the AFC West standings after Week 7:

1. Chiefs, 6-1
2. Raiders, 3-4 (3 games back)
3. Chargers, 2-4 (3.5 GB)
4. Broncos, 2-5 (4 GB)

Is the race to win the AFC West already over? Probably. I’m sure a stretch in the season will come when the Chiefs fuck around and get sloppy and lose a few times, thus giving life to the Chargers, who are the only credible threat in the division. But at this point the Chargers might just be broken. Their head coach is probably on his way out after the year.

Perhaps another reason I wasn’t hyped up today was because the Texas Rangers, somehow, are still alive in their best-of-seven series against the Houston Astros. Texas won Game 6, 9-2, forcing a Game 7 tomorrow night that will likely give me at minimum an anxiety attack and at maximum put me under some fucked up cardiac arrest and this will be the last blog you ever read of mine. Who knows? I hate baseball. It’s the worst.

I can count on football, though. Football is like that one thing that I can always rely on because the Chiefs are so fucking good all the time and even if they don’t win the Super Bowl this year I can still play that game within my head where I’m like okay, sure, even though we didn’t win it this year we’ve won it twice in the last five years and there will certainly be more to come. I can’t do that with baseball, because the Rangers have never won it all. I’m sure I’ll play similar mental gymnastics when tomorrow night the Astros win 15-2 and I can say I was just happy my team made it as far as they did, and that I have a lot to look forward to in the coming years. I do those types of things as a defense mechanism from having to confront certain realities.

The year is moving right along, though. As am I. Sports carry me through the good times and the bad. We call these types of things distractions, which are important.