TThe Kansas City Chiefs have been living a charmed life all season. Going into Sunday night’s game against the Los Angeles Chargers, the two-time defending Super Bowl champions had already set an NFL record with wins in 14 straight games by one score. And their point differential of +54 was the worst of any 11-1 team in pro football history.
Sunday evening was more of the same. The Chiefs took a 13-0 lead and for a split second it looked like they would comfortably win a game for once. Then the Chargers came back and there were three lead changes in the fourth quarter – all on field goals. The game-winner was entirely typical for the Chiefs this season: a 31-yard attempt from backup kicker Matthew Wright, who replaces the injured Harrison Butker. Wright’s effort went down the left and the whole world expected it to hook down the left, leaving Andy Reid’s team on the wrong end of the 17-16 scoreline.
But because these are the Chiefs of 2024, the ball dove off the left upright, bounced back to the right and the Chiefs won 19-17.
According to OPTAStatsWright was the third Chiefs this season kick to make a game-winning field goal as time expired in a game: Wright here, Butker against the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 2 and Spencer Shrader against the Carolina Panthers in Week 12. No other NFL team has ever more than one kicker to do so in a regular season in NFL history.
Now the 12-1 Chiefs have the worst point differential for any team ever with that record (+56), and they have extended their record streak of 15 straight wins in one-score games.
If the Chiefs were as good as you’d expect a Super Bowl champion to be, this would still be ridiculous — the kind of thing Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots got away with (legally and otherwise) for the better part of two decades. But on the surface, this Chiefs team is weaker than the team that has won Super Bowls in three of the last five seasons.
The Chiefs have gone through several running backs, receivers and offensive tackles this season. Steve Spagnuolo’s defense, which was the main reason Kansas City even went to the Super Bowl last year, has fallen off a cliff lately due to injuries and personnel issues. And yet, when all counts, there are still 31 NFL teams wondering what black magic the Chiefs have gotten themselves into, and where they can get it themselves.
It’s time to look under the hood and see what the Chiefs’ strength is.
Patrick Mahomes’ chemistry with Travis Kelce
Kelce is in his twelfth NFL season and the progression is visible. He is not as fast or physically dominant as he used to be. But the fusion of spirit he has built over time with Mahomes, now in his eighth season, shows up again and again in crucial moments. After the win over the Chargers, Andy Reid highlighted one play that swung things the Chiefs’ way. With two minutes left, Kansas City had the ball on the Chargers’ 20-yard line. It was third-and-7, and while Wright could have been the game-winner from that field position anyway, the Chiefs had another problem: They wanted to turn back the clock so the Chargers wouldn’t have a chance to score again.
The original play gave Mahomes the option of throwing the ball to running back Samaje Perine, or running the ball himself. But when the Chargers found themselves in reverse Cover-2 – in which the cornerbacks drop back to take on safety responsibilities – Mahomes saw another option, and that was to hit Kelce for a short nine-yard completion, something he did with ease. Mahomes then knelt twice to run out the clock, and Reid called timeout with one second left before Wright made the winning kick.
“I mean, I have confidence in Pat making those types of plays,” Reid said. “He actually said that before the play, just… ‘I’ll make something happen.'”
As usual, Mahomes did. And these plays are about more than random schoolyard football. When you do it that often and consistently, it’s really about two all-time great players knowing each other’s thoughts, and a head coach who believes in them.
The Chiefs are ridiculously good on third down
Speaking of successful conversions, as inconsistent as the Chiefs have been on both sides of the ball, they have the NFL’s most dominant attack on third down, allowing them to sustain drives despite the near-total absence of explosive play. Expected Points Added (EPA) is a metric that measures how well a team is performing compared to expectations on a play-to-play basis. This season, the Chiefs rank 12th in offensive EPA per game at first (-0.01), 17th at second (-0.08) and first at third (-0.08) (+0.29).
What does that mean in a practical sense? The Chiefs have had 194 third downs this season, converting 101 of them into firsts. That 52.1% conversion rate is the best in the NFL. And it showed up on that game-winning drive against the Chargers. With 4:20 remaining, the Chiefs had third-and-10 at their own 40-yard line after two consecutive Mahomes incompletions. Here the Chargers dropped into Cover-3 (zone with a single high safety) and sent a four-man attack on Mahomes with defenders in the right places in coverage. Naturally, Mahomes put on his wizard hat and responded with an unreal 14-yard completion to Xavier Worthy.
Oh, and there’s more: the Chiefs rank third in offensive EPA per game, fourth (+1.46, behind only the Washington Commanders and the Buffalo Bills), if things go that far .
Steve Spagnuolo has gone completely old-fashioned
Last offseason, the Chiefs traded top cornerback L’Jarius Sneed to the Tennessee Titans and moved Trent McDuffie from primary slot defender (where he was arguably the NFL’s best at his position) to a more outside role. There have been injuries and growing pains as a result, and the transition is one of the main reasons why Kansas City’s defense has regressed tremendously. Since Week 10, only the Cincinnati Bengals are ranked lower defensively FTN’s opponent-adjusted efficiency metrics.
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How has Spagnuolo responded? By going all the way back to the 1960s and 1970s, when zone defense was relatively new in professional football and aggressive press coverage was the order of the day. This season, the Chiefs have had at least one cornerback press on 88% of their snaps, by far the highest percentage in the NFL, and the highest percentage in the NFL since 2021, when Spagnuolo’s Chiefs had at least one receiver 90% of the time put pressure on.
Cornerbacks with so much press coverage are more likely to get beat because there is no room to recover before engaging the receiver. But Spags doesn’t care, and while many defensive coaches would sooner back down, that’s not the case here. Monday the Chiefs signed Steven Nelsonthe veteran cornerback who retired after the 2023 season and was one of the better press cornerbacks in the league.
Forget doubling; the Chiefs are going exponential here. And we’ve seen Spags put everything together at the right time before. We even saw it last season when they won the Super Bowl.
Last Christmas, the Chiefs decided they had enough of this garbage
According to NFL Research, winning by the smallest of steps is no longer unusual. So maybe it’s the league bending to the Chiefs’ curve, rather than the other way around.
Seven games in Week 14 were decided by six or fewer points. The Chiefs, the Detroit Lions and the Miami Dolphins won on the final plays of their games. In fact, 99 games this season have been decided by six or fewer points, the most by Week 14 in NFL history.
The league always wants as much equality as possible, and that is certainly happening now. It’s only fitting that the Champions are the personification of that. But as Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt recalled after the Charges’ win, it hasn’t always been this way.
“I’m certainly happy that we ended up on the winning side in those games,” Hunt said. “While we were going through this, I thought a lot about last year where we had a lot of close games and they tended to go the other way. We have really had a challenging period.”
Before their stellar streak began, the Chiefs were 4-5 in one-score games in 2023. Kansas City’s last loss in those types of games came on Christmas Day 2023, a 20-14 deficit in favor of the inferior Las Vegas Raiders. Kansas City gave up two defensive touchdowns and made all the mistakes they haven’t made since: turnovers, missed field goals and terrible third-down efficiency (5 of 16).
The chefs were ashamed and angryand there was something transformative about that debacle. Or maybe they just went from bad luck – losing close games in 2023 – to good luck – winning close games in 2024. It could also be, as the poet John Milton first said, “Happiness is the residue of design.” They have the rest of the season to further prove how much design is behind all that luck.
Will the trend continue?
It’s not like the Chiefs have been doing all this voodoo against suckers. Their schedule so far was in the middle of the pack in terms of opponent-adjusted strengthand it will remain that way for the rest of the regular season.
Perhaps the toughest test of the regular season comes on Christmas Day, when the Chiefs travel to Pittsburgh to face the 10-3 Steelers, who are more than capable of dominating on both sides of the ball with a tough defense, and Russell Wilson plays like the Russell Wilson of old. Perhaps the Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans or Denver Broncos (who already lost 16-14 to the Chiefs in Week 10 on a last-second blocked field goal) could pull off a performance that produces a fluke victory. But we’re getting to the point where we’re not going to be completely surprised when these guys take the lead.
Also, the Chiefs clinched the AFC West after their win over the Chargers, and they are the conference’s No. 1 seed. That means if everything stays where it is, the road to the Super Bowl will go through Arrowhead Stadium, something no team in the NFL wants outside of Kansas City. Even the Buffalo Bills, the only team to defeat the Chiefs this season (a 30-21 game in Week 11), did so at home.
It’s another example of the Chiefs’ “luck” being much more than just luck. Without an improvement in performance in at least one category, will the Chiefs struggle in the postseason? Sure, but if you include the tangible and the intangible, it would be extremely unwise to bet against them, no matter how fragile they seem.