The Road To Glory II: Part X

Green Bay Packers 27, Kansas City Chiefs 19

The Road To Glory is an annual season-long chronicle of the Kansas City Chiefs football team, but as I have written before ad nauseam it’s really the story of my life. It’s kind of how like when one of your favorite bands releases a new album and pretty much whatever it is they are saying or singing about is relatable to you at that time. You can really feel it. I don’t know when the Chiefs transcended from being just another football team, or another one of a collection of my favorite sports teams, into a type of checkpoint, such as you would find when playing a video game or something, but it’s on this blog of mine where each week I get to save my progress.

And all the clichés are relevant. You have to take it one week at a time. You have to take it one game at a time. You have to take it one play at a time, even. Each day you have to get just a little bit better. Keep building, and growing, and never take anything for granted. The process is more important than the outcomes. That’s why this is a road — it’s a long road — but the end goal is always glory. The only way to get there is by taking it one day at a time.

This particular loss to the Packers was not the worst of the Chiefs’ season, though it certainly I think without any question offered the most clarity. I considered it sobering, in fact, because throughout this 2023 season all of us fans and the football world as a whole have kind of been waiting on Kansas City to turn into the Big Bad Wolf again. This loss to the Packers acted as a real truth-telling experience, and above anything it’s important to acknowledge the truth. I mean it’s far more comforting to ignore it, the truth, that is, pretend at times it’s not there. We wish it sometimes to be different. Regardless of how we feel about it or what we want it to be will never change the reality of it. The truth.

It doesn’t take a fucking genius to know the Chiefs offense is lacking. It’s lacking wide receiver talent, it is lacking running back depth, its most important non-QB player — Travis Kelce — either got old really fast or is distracted by his very public relationship with Taylor Swift, or both, and the offensive line is not as productive as it was a year ago. For the first time since Patrick Mahomes ascended to becoming the best player on the planet, in 2018, there exists within the offense very little margin for error. Those silly 10-yard holding penalties that turn a 2nd-and-10 into a 2nd-and-20 — what would, at worst, be considered minor inconveniences in year’s past — are now becoming drive-killers and death knells.

There isn’t any other way to put it: Kansas City has become not so different from most other good-but-not-great teams in the NFL. Sure, most offensive efficiency metrics still rate the Chiefs highly — somewhere around the top-5, or whatever. But the drop-off from being the clear-cut number one, as they have been for so long, to being even top-5-ish, is for the Chiefs fucking substantial. It was the cheat code they have held over the rest of the league for the last half-decade. Patrick Mahomes can be great and, at the same time, not nearly good enough to overcome such a deficiency. That’s a problem.

The real shame is that undeniably the Chiefs possess by far their best defensive unit in 2023. Over the course of Patrick Mahomes’s six seasons in the NFL the offense has been so superb that all that was ever asked of the defense was to force like two punts per game from the opposition and the Chiefs would win. Turn like two touchdowns from the other team into field goals and the Chiefs would win. We are talking about an exceptionally low bar.

This season the defense has been the reason why the Chiefs are 8-4. In the past the joke-but-it’s-not-really-a-joke about Kansas City is that if the defense allowed 30 points or less then they would win. Well this year they have allowed on average just 17.3 points per game; their highest points-against output was against the Packers at 27; before that they had allowed 20 points or fewer eight times, which unironically are the eight games the Chiefs have won. In their four losses they have given up 21, 24, 21 and 27.

The word is hubris, and Kansas City’s front office has a lot of that. They had the fucking balls to trade Tyreek Hill — arguably the most gifted wide receiver in the NFL — to the Dolphins before last season, and somehow they, the Chiefs, were rewarded by winning the Super Bowl. How can you accomplish such a feat and not think, like, it doesn’t matter who Patrick Mahomes is throwing the ball to? Unfortunately it has now become apparent that it does kind of matter.

Back to the beginning, though: sober reflections. That is what the 27-19 loss to the Packers gave us. At 8-4, the Chiefs no longer have the luxury of controlling their own destiny insofar as the AFC’s one seed is concerned. Odds are now likelier than not that they will have to play on Wild Card Weekend, and god willing if they are able to advance will have to go on the road at least once in the playoffs. What that means is there isn’t any more time to dick around and play practice during meaningful games. They will have to lock it in, play their best players, and win football games.

That isn’t going to be easy because like I said: hubris. With the best player on the planet playing under center, they have gotten away with experimenting with players like Skyy Moore (whom they used a second-round pick on in 2022), Kadarius Toney (whom they traded a third-round pick for last season), and even Clyde Edwards-Helaire (whom they drafted in the first round in 2020). I get that the front office wants to prove it made good decisions, and continue trying to fit the square pegs into the circular holes, but the NFL isn’t one of those sports where you can get away with that sort of thing for very long, regardless of who is playing quarterback.

My gut tells me it’s time to cut bait. To close the coffin on the experiments. It would be a subtle admission that they were wrong, the front office, that is, but we here are in the business of winning championships. The only avenue to get there is by playing the best players.

And it might not even matter, honestly. The AFC has been decimated by injuries in 2023, from Aaron Rodgers to Joe Burrow to Deshaun Watson to now, possibly, Trevor Lawrence, so a lot of the good teams aren’t really in the picture anymore. The Dolphins and Ravens are each 9-3, and the former has a concussion-prone quarterback, Tua [I can’t spell his last name off the top of my head], and the latter has had so little playoff success that nobody is really going to take him, Lamar Jackson, seriously until he wins when it matters.

Patrick Mahomes, on the other hand, is one of those apex-predator over-my-dead-body competitors where nobody ever feels like he is truly out of a football game. He has made a young career out of doing the impossible, winning games he has no business winning, getting injured and still playing, etc. And after this week’s game against a 6-6 Bills team that absolutely fucking needs it, the Chiefs end the season with four games where they will likely be favored by a touchdown in, at minimum, against the Patriots, Raiders, Bengals and Chargers. I’d wager a fairly large sum of my hard-earned greenbacks that the absolute worst record the Chiefs finish the season with is 12-5.

What does any of this mean? Very little. I just think it’s one of those things where I woke up on Monday — after the Chiefs lost the night before — and thought to myself, like, why am I not being more truthful and more serious to myself? I’ve said in the past that I was never delusional, just wrong. There is a massive difference between the two. I’m guilty too of harboring too much hubris, of believing every decision I make is the right one, not because it’s actually right but because it’s me who is making it.

I have had an incredible season betting on NFL games and frequently in the past when I have been so correct so often I have become a victim to believing it doesn’t really matter which games I pick because, of course, if I am picking them then it has to be the right pick. This year I have tried to maintain some semblance of diligence, to try making the best possible decisions, at least in terms of picking winners, but in the end, as I sit here, I remain unaware if I am legitimately making better choices or if it’s some cosmic reward from the universe for eating shit for so long in 2023.

But I suppose that is all a part of what makes these reflections so sober. To win, to get to Glory, the Chiefs are not going to be able to do what they have been doing. And neither can I.