Last season, the Kansas City Chiefs made the Super Bowl, just as they did in 2024, 2023, 2021, and 2020. (It could have been five in a row if they hadn’t blown an eighteen-point lead in the 2022 AFC Championship Game.) They finished the 2024 regular season with a 15-2 record, suggesting they have been very good. In reality, they weren’t very good. Plus, no one likes them.
Maybe not person. Taylor Swift likes them. Plus, it looks like someone in the NFL league office likes them, as the Chiefs are expected to play in more high-profile games this season than any other team. They began the season in São Paulo, Brazil, facing the Los Angeles Chargers, at the forefront of the NFL’s imperial ambitions. They faced the Eagles in Week 2, in a Super Bowl rematch on Fox. They play three times in the main Sunday night slot and twice on Monday Night Football. They will face the Dallas Cowboys in the Thanksgiving afternoon game, traditionally the biggest game of the year. And for good measure, they’ll play the Broncos on Christmas. And it seems for good reason: Their game against the Eagles drew nearly thirty-four million viewers, the most ever for a Sunday regular season game on Fox. But it’s safe to say that not everyone watching them was rooting for them. There was a time when a lot of people loved the Chiefs. They were the fun and exciting underdogs who ended the long, sad dynasty of the New England Patriots. They had a quarterback who could improvise like Michael Jordan could dunk. But, as the Chiefs attempted to win an unprecedented three-peat in the Super Bowl last season, they became the team people loved to hate.
There were obvious reasons: Patrick Mahomes’ terrible State Farm ads; exposure fatigue; the little explosions of rage that occur in some men’s brains whenever Swift’s success is mentioned. There was also perhaps a general irritation that such a successful team could benefit from so much stupid luck. Twelve of the Chiefs’ wins last season, including the playoffs, came by one score. They won a game with a blocked field goal. They won another by the length of a toe. Mahomes, whose unparalleled brilliance involves the ability to transform into the type of quarterback his team needs, transformed himself into a system QB who threw checks and collapsed spectacularly every time a referee was present. “If winning football games makes you a bad guy, we’re going to continue to go out there and do it,” Mahomes said. There were rumors that Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, Swift’s Ken, who also happens to be a future Hall of Famer, would pop the question on the field if his team won the Super Bowl. Instead, Kelce had to settle for proposing after recording a podcast. The Chiefs were blown out by the Philadelphia Eagles — at one point the score was 34-0 — and Kelce was spotted on the sidelines yelling and punching Chiefs coach Andy Reid.
This was dismissed as the passion of a very competitive (and, judging by Swift’s words, very passionate) man. But this could be the expression of something else: behavior symptomatic of a team in which no one is having much fun on the pitch anymore. Certainly not Kelce, who was caught up in other shouting incidents earlier this season. Kelce, in his mid-30s, was forced to carry an unusually heavy offensive burden, in part because he hit the team’s 2024 first-round pick, wide receiver Xavier Worthy, on a crossing route in their first game of the season, which left Worthy with a dislocated shoulder. Another top receiver, Rashee Rice, began the season with a six-game suspension for violating the league’s personal conduct policy due to his role in a multi-car accident in Dallas during the 2024 offseason. The team’s running backs were so ineffective that Mahomes was the team’s leading rusher through the first five games. And the defense, the team’s biggest strength last season, at least until the Super Bowl, was a sieve against the run.
The team, however, excelled in taking penalties, fourth in the league. The Chiefs drew thirteen flags in Monday night’s game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, including one that put the Jaguars, trailing by four, on the one-yard line with thirty seconds remaining. On the next play, Trevor Lawrence, the Jags’ quarterback, tripped and fell to the ground. He then frantically tried to get up and almost lost the ball in the process. Finally, he got up and rushed toward the end zone, as Chris Jones, the Chiefs’ All-Pro defensive tackle, was strolling near the goal line, thinking the play was over. Lawrence dove into the end zone. The Jaguars won 31-28, dropping the Chiefs to a 2-3 record.
The losing record means about as much as the Chiefs’ record last season: not much. The first loss of the season, to the Chargers, was a one-score loss to an inspired quarterback in Brazil. The second was a one score loss to the Eagles. The Chiefs had two convincing wins before losing to the Jaguars, and in that game the Chiefs dominated the Jaguars on almost every metric except scoring, outgaining them 476 to 319 yards. Mahomes did some Mahomesian things and got on the field more often than last season and in tighter windows. Since 1990, only twelve percent of teams that started the season 0-2 have made the playoffs, but the Chiefs have a good chance of making it. They play in a weak division, and should soon see their ceiling rise once Rice returns. The Chiefs enter their game against the Detroit Lions, one of the best teams in the league, as slight favorites. Regardless of how the Chiefs perform this weekend, their season is not over.
