Trailing the Denver Broncos 28-24 with 1:56 remaining on the game clock, Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs began the game-winning drive on their own 44 yard line.
Texting with my friends, I was unworried — the opposite of worry. Games like these, and drives like these, were how Patrick Mahomes made a name for himself. They were what almost instantaneously in his career made him part of an elite collection of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, and shortly thereafter the undisputed best quarterback in the NFL, and later on further made him one of the best quarterbacks in the history of the NFL, and if he retired today, like right this second, Mahomes would stand second to only Tom Brady insofar as legendary QBs are concerned. These are objective facts. They require no argument.
The Chiefs were so confident in the score, and their positioning on the field, and the time remaining on the 4th quarter clock, that they actually ran the ball on 1st-and-10 from their own 44. Watching, I couldn’t help but feel that such a play call took balls. The following play Mahomes hit his Hall-of-Fame partner, Travis Kelce, for 32 yards, putting Kansas City in prime position to execute one of their famous gotta-have-it touchdown drives to win the game. They advanced the ball so far down the field in such a short amount of time that the Broncos started using their timeouts — with the expectation that the Chiefs would inevitably score, and hoping to leave themselves as much time on the clock as possible.
I stood in front of me TV, unbothered — the opposite of bother. For almost a decade, or at least since Patrick Mahomes has acted as field general, the Chiefs have been the best reality show in the world. The big games they take part in are generally close. Kansas City is generally the favorite. The opposing team generally takes a lead late in the game. And then Mahomes takes the ball, drives it down the field, and rips out the hearts not only of the team he plays but the many (overwhelming majority of) fans across the country who are rooting for him to fail.
That is what makes he and the Chiefs the greatest reality television show in the world: Not because there is any question who the winner of the contest will be, but rather everything that happens leading up to that specific and highly predictable outcome. That is the reason people watch, and that is the reason they keep watching.
In the red zone — which is inside the 20 yard line — the Broncos burned their final two timeouts, leaving the Chiefs with nothing but a perfect finish in front of them. They chewed up the clock and found themselves at Denver’s one yard line with 15 seconds left and one timeout of their own. There, Mahomes threw an incomplete pass, they ran the ball with Kenneth Walker III for no gain, and on 4th-and-goal with 9 seconds left Patrick Mahomes threw a game-winning touchdown to WR Rashee Rice. The game was over. Chiefs win. Broncos lose. Just what America expected, and knew would ultimately happen.
Only it didn’t count, because Kansas City’s right tackle, Jaylen Moore, was called for a false start, moving the Chiefs back five yards. On the following play, the final play of the game, Mahomes got sacked and the Chiefs lost — the opposite of winning. It was the weirdest, craziest, best ending to a game of the 2026 NFL season. The best reality show on the planet remained so because the quarterback who was supposed to win, and the team who was supposed to win, failed.
I had to get ready for work so I did not have time to brood, but what I couldn’t shake in the immediate aftermath and much later on in my night, which was supposed to be ruined by this particularly awful outcome, was how OK I felt about it. I was fine. Everything was all right.
Because even though the Chiefs lost, they were in absolute control of the game. For the majority of the second half they were winning either 17-13 or 24-13, and it took a couple chunk plays to put the Broncos in position for a lead, and for Mahomes to fail at the one thing he almost always accomplishes — game-winning drives — for that specific outcome to prevail.
And, if we are being honest, Mahomes kind of did win the game. I am not blaming referees or anything, or arguing that Jaylen Moore did not, in fact, flinch (which is a false start). I am just saying that the play went on as normal. The Chiefs played offense, the Broncos played defense, and Rashee Rice caught the ball in the end zone for the walk off touchdown. All of these things happened regardless of Moore’s penalty, which had zero impact on the result of the play.
There is probably some irony in the idea that the Chiefs lost the game and yet simultaneously I feel better about them moving forward. I am, if nothing else, a semi-philosophical sort of sports fan. The NFL is a terribly long season. Every week means something, and the great players of today quickly turn into yesterday’s news after injuries or underperformance. It is the closest thing to a living, breathing organism that exists in professional sports. The NFL, I mean. In spite of Sunday’s outcome, the Chiefs can take solace in their two constants: QB Patrick Mahomes, and head coach Andy Reid.
Since the league moves as quickly, and as harshly — in an unforgiving sort of way — as it does, I guess it has just felt like a while since the Chiefs were involved in a quote end quote Big Game. That is what this one was. A win for Kansas City would have put them at 6-1, it would have put the Broncos at 5-3, and it would have given the Chiefs a season sweep over their biggest competition in the AFC West. Given that the opposite occurred, Kansas City is now 5-2 and in second place (behind the 6-2 Broncos).
What I mean to say is: The Chiefs won back-to-back Super Bowls in 2022 and 2023, and then they got dismantled on their way to a three-peat in the Super Bowl in 2024 against the Philadelphia Eagles, and then last year they were kind of pitter-pattering through the season before Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL on December 14, 2025, and that was it for their year. They did not participate in the playoffs. In nearly every conceivable way the Chiefs had not played in a Big Game since the day they got blown out by the Eagles — in February, 2025.
I think that is the real perspective I am trying to keep close. The fact that this loss to the Broncos was, at the end of the day, a mere regular season game. There was obvious consequence riding on it, even to the extent that it may have been the difference between winning the AFC West and entering the playoffs as a wild card team, but make-or-break it was not. It was not their season on the line. It was a Big Game, to be sure, and at the same time it was just a game.
And the Chiefs did everything they had to to win. They orchestrated the type of game-winning drive that for the last decade has been their calling card. When they absolutely had to have it, they got it. Mahomes, and his unfortunate dearth of playmakers, not only advanced the ball into prime scoring position but forced their opposition to exhaust their two remaining timeouts. Save for the false start penalty, and the fact that it determined the outcome of the game, Kansas City executed a perfect two-minute drill.
As we move ever forward through the NFL season, these are the minor and sometimes-forgotten details that are often overlooked. We as Chiefs fans remember the great games (as this was) and we lament the petty penalties that differentiate wins from losses, but I fear that far too many followers of this particular team will focus too much on the final result rather than the all-too-familiar end-of-game process that put the Chiefs in position to win. I am choosing to eschew the former in favor of the latter.
And, maybe, that makes me a so-called homer for my favorite sports team. Maybe the more prudent item on the table is to do what I have generally always done and nitpick the most successful NFL franchise of the last decade during the Good Times, and play devil’s advocate and say, you know, maybe even in the Bad Times the glass is, actually, half-full — as I am doing now — but so it is. If I must die on this hill then that what I will do.
With information and analytics as omnipresent as ever, and as powerful as ever, one not need look far for every other angle to this game. One can see how poor the Chiefs’ receiving options are at beating man-to-man coverage, and how harmfully that has impacted Kenneth Walker III and Kansas City’s running game over the last few weeks. One can see how average (at best) the Chiefs’ pass rush has been, and how much stress that has put on their secondary. The math is the math. The charts are the charts. Nobody is reading my blog to crunch those numbers any further.
Instead, I must rely on my eyes. I must compare what I have seen in the past to what I am seeing now. And in spite of the obvious issues the Chiefs are dealing with and will very likely continue to deal with, to me football is actually quite simple. It is about getting a defensive stop when a stop is required to win a football game, and it is about getting a touchdown when a touchdown is required to win a football game. Patrick Mahomes has proven that he can still do that.
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