The Kansas City Chiefs have been living a charmed life all season. Coming into Sunday night’s game against the Los Angeles Chargers, the two-time defending Super Bowl champions had already set an NFL record with victories in 14 straight one-score games. And their point differential of +54 was the worst of any 11-1 team in pro football history.
Sunday night was more of the same. The Chiefs got out to a 13-0 lead, and it seemed for a split second that, for once, they would win a game comfortably. 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 by backup kicker Matthew Wright, who is in for the injured Harrison Butker. Wright’s attempt hooked left, and looked for all the world that it would keep hooking left, leaving Andy Reid’s team on the wrong end of a 17-16 score.
But because this is the 2024 Chiefs, the ball doinked off the left upright, rebounded to the right and the Chiefs won 19-17.
The sound every kicker hates... Unless you're Matthew Wright 😅 @Chiefs #NFL #LACvsKC #ChiefsKingdom pic.twitter.com/Rv0g7nMrn9
— NFL Australia & NZ (@NFLAUNZ) December 9, 2024
Per OPTAStats, Wright was the third Chiefs kicker this season 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 had more than one kicker 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’ve extended their all-time 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 kinds of thing Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots got away with (legally and otherwise) for the better part of two decades. But, at least on the surface, this Chiefs team is weaker than the ones that won Super Bowls in three of the last five seasons.
The Chiefs have been cycling through starting running backs, receivers, and offensive tackles this season. Steve Spagnuolo’s defense, which was the primary reason Kansas City even got to last year’s Super Bowl, has fallen off a cliff of late due to injuries and personnel issues. And still, when everything counts, there are 31 NFL teams left wondering just what black magic the Chiefs got themselves into, and where they can get some themselves.
It’s time to look under the hood and see what is powering the Chiefs’ run.
Patrick Mahomes’s chemistry with Travis Kelce
Kelce is in his 12th NFL season, and the attrition shows. He is not as fast or physically dominant as he used to be. But the mind-meld he has built over time with Mahomes, who is now in his eighth season, shows up over and over again in pivotal moments. After the win over the Chargers, Andy Reid highlighted one play that swung things in the Chiefs’ direction. With two minutes left in the game, Kansas City had the ball on the Chargers’ 20-yard line. It was third-and-seven, and while Wright might have made the game-winner from that field position anyway, the Chiefs had another issue – they wanted to run the clock down so that the Chargers would not have a chance to score again.
The original play gave Mahomes the option to throw the ball to running back Samaje Perine, or run the ball himself. But when the Chargers dropped into inverted Cover-2 – in which the cornerbacks drop back to take safety responsibilities – Mahomes saw another option, and that was to hit Kelce for a short completion of nine yards, something he did with ease. Mahomes then knelt twice to bleed the clock down, and Reid called the timeout with one second left before Wright made the game-winning kick.
The Chiefs expected the Chargers to come after them on the Mahomes pass to Travis Kelce with 2:00 left in the game. Instead, they dropped into Invert-2, and Mahomes threw out the RB Flat/QB Run options. He had Kelce on the sit route. That set up the game-winning DOINK. pic.twitter.com/aZ1xaumGHs
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) December 9, 2024
“I mean, I have trust in Pat making those kinds of plays,” Reid said. “He kind of 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 this often and this consistently, it’s really about two all-time great players who know each other’s minds, 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 offense on third down, which allows them to sustain drives despite the near-total absence of explosive plays. Expected Points Added (EPA) is a metric that measures how well a team performs compared to expectations on a play-to-play basis. This season, the Chiefs rank 12th in offensive EPA per play on first down (-0.01), 17th on second down (-0.08), and first on third down (+0.29).
What does that mean in a practical sense? The Chiefs have had 194 third downs this season, and they’ve converted 101 into firsts. That conversion rate of 52.1% is the NFL’s best. And it showed up on that game-winning drive against the Chargers. With 4:20 left, the Chiefs had third-and-10 at their own 40-yard line after two straight Mahomes incompletions. Here, the Chargers dropped into Cover-3 (zone with a single-high safety), and sent a four-man rush at Mahomes with defenders in all the right places in coverage. Of course, Mahomes put on his wizard hat, and countered with an unreal 14-yard completion to Xavier Worthy.
The Chargers did everything right here. The only thing they did wrong is that they did it against Patrick Mahomes. pic.twitter.com/eSGwTfcjZx
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) December 9, 2024
Oh, and there’s more: the Chiefs rank third in offensive EPA per play on fourth down (+1.46, behind only the Washington Commanders and the Buffalo Bills), when things go that far.
Steve Spagnuolo has gone completely old-school
This past offseason, the Chiefs traded top cornerback L’Jarius Sneed to the Tennessee Titans, and moved Trent McDuffie from primary slot defender (where he was probably the NFL’s best at his position) to more of an outside role. There have been injuries and growing pains as a result, and the transition is a primary reason Kansas City’s defense has regressed mightily. Since Week 10, only the Cincinnati Bengals have ranked lower defensively in FTN’s opponent-adjusted efficiency metrics.
How has Spagnuolo responded? By going all the way back to the 1960s and 1970s, when zone defenses were relatively new in pro football, and aggressive press coverage was the order of the day. This season, the Chiefs have had at least one cornerback in press coverage on 88% of their snaps, by far the NFL’s highest rate, and the NFL’s highest rate since 2021, when Spagnuolo’s Chiefs pressed at least one receiver 90% of the time.
Cornerbacks who play that much press coverage are prone to getting beaten more often, because there’s no room to recover before engaging the receiver. But Spags doesn’t care, and while a lot of defensive coaches would be more likely to back off, that is not the case here. On Monday, the Chiefs signed Steven Nelson, the veteran cornerback who retired after the 2023 season, and has been one of the league’s better press cornerbacks.
Forget doubling down; the Chiefs are going exponential here. And we’ve seen Spags put it all together at the right time before. In fact, we saw it last season when they won the Super Bowl.
Last Christmas, the Chiefs decided they’d had enough of this garbage
Per NFL Research, it’s no longer unusual to win by the smallest of increments. So maybe it’s the league that is bending to the Chiefs’ curve as opposed to 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 through Week 14 in NFL history.
The league always wants as much parity as possible, and that’s certainly happening now. It’s only fitting that the champs are the personification of such. But as Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt remembered after the Charges win, it hasn’t always been this way.
“I’m certainly glad that we’ve ended up on the winning side of those games,” Hunt said. “As we’ve been going through it, I’ve thought a lot about last year where we had a lot of close games and they tended to go the other way. We really had a challenging stretch.”
Before their amazing streak began, the Chiefs were 4-5 in one-score games in 2023. The last Kansas City loss in that type of game 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 with turnovers, missed field goals, and awful third-down efficiency (5 of 16).
The Chiefs were embarrassed and pissed off, and there was something transformative about that debacle. Or maybe they just went from being unlucky – losing close games in 2023 – to lucky – winning close games in 2024. It could also be, as the poet John Milton first said, that “Luck is the residue of design.” They have the rest of the season to further prove how much design is behind all that good fortune.
Will the trend continue?
It’s not that the Chiefs have been doing all this voodoo against chumps. Their schedule to date has been middle of the pack as far as opponent-adjusted strength, and that will continue through the rest of the regular season.
Perhaps the sternest test in the regular season will come on Christmas Day, when the Chiefs travel to Pittsburgh to meet the 10-3 Steelers, who are more than capable of dominating on both sides of the ball with a stern defense, and Russell Wilson playing like the Russell Wilson of old. Maybe the Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans, or Denver Broncos (who already lost to the Chiefs 16-14 in Week 10 on a last-second blocked field goal) could come up with a performance that engenders a fluke win. But we’re getting to the point where we won’t be completely surprised if these guys run the table.
Also, the Chiefs clinched the AFC West after their win over the Chargers, and they’re the conference’s No 1 seed. Which means that 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 Kansas City. Even the Buffalo Bills, the one team to hand the Chiefs a loss this season – a 30-21 game in Week 11 – did so on their own home turf.
It’s one more example of the Chiefs’ “luck” that is far more than just luck. Will the Chiefs struggle in the postseason without an uptick in performance in at least one category? Sure, but when you factor in the tangibles and the intangibles, it would be extremely unwise to bet against them, no matter how vulnerable they may look.
