When Broncos kicker Wil Lutz lined up for a 35-yard field goal to win the game against the Chiefs on Sunday, it must have felt like déjà vu in Denver. Almost exactly one year ago, Lutz was lining up for a 35-yard field goal to beat these same Chiefs at Empower Field at Mile High. Like this one, that kick came after an impressive drive by young quarterback Bo Nix, who had run a mistake-free offense and gotten his team in position for a signature win. Broncos fans were desperate to get one over on their rivals, wanting the sort of victory that propels a franchise forward. It’s hard to believe you’ll beat the Chiefs until you actually beat the Chiefs.
What happened next is most, if not all, of the difference between the 2024 Chiefs and the 2025 Chiefs. Last season’s team managed to save itself and emerge with a 19-17 victory when Leo Chenal blocked Lutz’s kick. Kansas City went an NFL-record 10-0 in games decided by seven points or less. This year’s team … has not done well in one-score games. After Lutz put his kick through the uprights for a 22-19 Denver win, the Chiefs fell to 0-5 in one-score matchups in 2025.
This was supposed to be the moment when the Chiefs righted the ship. Losing to the Bills in Week 9 was one thing, but Kansas City was now fresh off a bye, which famously affords coach Andy Reid time to build unstoppable game plans. The Broncos were without their best player in star cornerback Pat Surtain II, and Nix was coming off a narrow victory over the Raiders in which he was booed by his own fans. Denver had beaten the Chiefs’ backups in Week 18 last season, but this was different; sitting in eighth place in the AFC, the Chiefs were set to work their way back up to the top of the title picture.
And then they weren’t. The Chiefs’ streak of nine straight AFC West titles is now in serious jeopardy, as they’re 5-5 overall, 3½ games behind Denver and losing the head-to-head tiebreakers with both the Broncos and Chargers. It’s perhaps going to be a very quiet January in the hotels and restaurants of Kansas City for the first time in nearly a decade, and the Chiefs might not be intimidating anybody with the threat of playing in front of their raucous fans in frigid conditions.
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Could it be even worse? Sunday’s loss dropped the Chiefs to the ninth seed in the AFC. The three teams currently in wild-card spots are the Bills, Chargers and Jaguars, who all have one thing in common: beating the Chiefs this season, giving them all the head-to-head tiebreaker advantage. Kansas City is 2-4 in the AFC this season, and it is about to go play the Colts, who are sitting pretty atop the AFC South at 8-2.
It seems wild to suggest that the Chiefs are in serious danger of missing the postseason, and I’ll lay out why I don’t think there’s as much of a difference between this year’s Chiefs and last year’s team by play-by-play standards as it might seem. But ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) gives the Chiefs a 44.6% chance of missing the playoffs after Sunday’s loss. And while it’s easy to dismiss an algorithm and say that it doesn’t understand that these are the Chiefs, well, it was easy to say that about Kansas City’s record in one-score games before the season, too. And now, as Patrick Mahomes & Co. try to recover after another frustrating loss, it feels like this version of the Chiefs is susceptible to a lot of things, math included.
I have all kinds of questions about them right now, and I imagine you do as well. Can the Chiefs pull themselves out of this rut? Or are we looking at a fatally flawed version of a perennial Super Bowl contender? Imagining a playoff picture that doesn’t go through Kansas City is one thing. Imagining a playoff picture without the Chiefs at all? That’s something entirely different.
Jump to:
Are the Chiefs broken?
Why isn’t Mahomes bailing them out?
What’s actually different in 2025?
Does this ever happen to elite QBs?
Could they miss the playoffs?
Could they still win it all?
Are the Chiefs broken?
Deep breath … no. In fact, I don’t think there’s a huge difference on a play-by-play basis between this season’s Chiefs at 5-5 and last season’s team, which went 15-1 before sitting starters against the Broncos after clinching the AFC’s top seed. The measures we use to project underlying performance don’t see a dramatic gap between the two teams.
Lions and Ravens.
The Pythagorean expectation formula would project the 2024 Chiefs to win 10.2 games over a full season and the 2025 Chiefs to win 11.7 games. How and when those points arrive matter, of course, but we know point differential is a better predictor of future win-loss record than the actual win-loss record.
DVOA — which adjusts for down, distance, opponent and game situation — does an even better job of contextualizing team performance than point differential. Before the Week 18 Broncos game last season, the Chiefs were sitting sixth in the league in DVOA at a 21.4% mark. While their 2025 mark doesn’t yet include Sunday’s loss, the Chiefs went into the Broncos game fifth in the league in 2025 DVOA at 25.1%.
ESPN’s FPI also endeavors to measure team strength by adjusting for what does and does not matter. Last season’s Chiefs finished the regular season sixth in FPI. Even with a 5-4 record, the Chiefs entered Sunday leading the league in FPI … and they are still No. 1 after Sunday’s loss.
EPA agrees with the theme here, too. The Chiefs were 11th in EPA per play on offense a year ago and are all the way up to third this season. The defense has improved from 15th in EPA per play to 10th. The schedule has been tougher — the Chiefs faced the league’s 18th-toughest slate in 2024 and have been up against the fifth-toughest set of opponents so far this season — but that’s not enough to account for them going from 15-2 to a 5-5 mark at the midway point of the season.
The difference, of course, is that the Chiefs always managed to find ways to win those close games in 2024. In August, I had the Chiefs on my annual list of teams likely to decline, which shouldn’t have surprised anyone; it’s almost impossible to win 15 or more games in back-to-back seasons, and I’ve been pegging teams with unsustainable records in one-score games as likely decline candidates for quite a long time now. (I still thought the Chiefs were going to win 12 games, which would now require them winning out.)
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The idea that Mahomes always bailed them out in these situations last season, though, is misplaced. There were plenty of times that he had a chance to either take the lead or seal a game with a drive late in the fourth quarter, only for the offense to flail or disappoint. In their wins over the Ravens, Falcons, Buccaneers, Panthers and Raiders, the Chiefs failed to put away the game or eat up any sort of significant time or yardage with their drives late in the fourth quarter.
It’s a little different in a tie game like Sunday’s Broncos matchup than it would be running a four-minute drill with a lead in those other contests, but the Chiefs have never been completely reliant on their run game to seal up wins. They struggled in situations where a touchdown would have been essential, too. Take last year against the Broncos, when the Chiefs failed on third-and-goal from the 2-yard line with 5:59 to go and settled for a 20-yard field goal to take a two-point lead. The Broncos held the ball the rest of the way and didn’t need to march the length of the field for a touchdown, instead getting into field goal range before Chenal dashed their hopes.
You would have to be very generous to suggest that the defense came up with a stop on that blocked kick in that game, given that it allowed the Broncos to get into field goal range to begin with. And while the Chiefs defense held the Broncos to a field goal on the second-to-last drive Sunday, the Chiefs also allowed a third-and-15 conversion by Nix to Courtland Sutton on a surprisingly passive defensive look. Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo showed a five-man rush and then sent three and played Cover 2 man with seven defenders in coverage and a spy — a look that defensive tackle Chris Jones suggested the Broncos called out before the snap. Nix had all day to throw, and Sutton eventually separated from cornerback Jaylen Watson.
Again, though, memories of the defense shutting the door with the game on the line over and over again a year ago are a little misguided. The Ravens marched downfield and came within an Isaiah Likely toenail of scoring a touchdown on the final snap. The Falcons went down the field twice to potentially score a game-winning touchdown in the fourth quarter, only for the Chiefs to get away with an egregious pass interference penalty. Raiders quarterback Aidan O’Connell dropped a snap in field goal range down two points. And of course, Chenal blocked the field goal against the Broncos.
Even if we count those as spectacularly timed stops, this defense still actually blew leads in 2024. The Bucs scored a touchdown with 36 seconds left and kicked an extra point to tie the game, but the Chiefs won the coin toss in overtime and never gave the ball back. The Panthers scored a touchdown and 2-pointer to tie the game with 1:49 to go, only for Mahomes to lead a game-winning drive. The Chargers held the ball for eight minutes and kicked a field goal to take a lead, only for a 31-yard attempt by Matthew Wright to bounce off the uprights and in to give the Chiefs a last-second victory.
Trevor Lawrence and the Jaguars to go 60 yards in 75 seconds while protecting a four-point lead, finishing with Lawrence tripping and still having enough time to get up and scramble in for a game-winning touchdown. The Chiefs scored a touchdown to take the lead with 1:48 to go in that game, but Harrison Butker helped fired his kickoff out of bounds, handing the Jags the ball at the 40-yard line.
If we start looking for actual things that have been problems for the Chiefs versus what was going on in 2024, special teams might be a good place to start …
What’s actually different (and worrying)?
The Chiefs were generally solid on special teams last season and had a few key moments go their way. Chenal won a game with that block. Daniel Carlson missed a 58-yard field goal that would have given the Raiders a fourth-quarter lead. Wright’s field goal bounced off the uprights and in to decide a game. Kickers hit a league-low 81.8% of their field goal and extra point attempts in any situation against the Chiefs last season. They’re 33-of-35 (94.3%) this season.
Between their various kickers last year, the Chiefs were 6-for-6 on field goal attempts to take the lead in the fourth quarter, which was three more successful conversions than any other team in the NFL. They have had a much sloppier operation this season, although it has been mostly in other, more subtle ways. Butker missed an extra point in the loss to the Chargers and a 58-yard field goal attempt in the three-point defeat to the Eagles. On Sunday, he had a kickoff land short of the landing zone, though it didn’t yield any points on the ensuing Broncos drive.
Butker also crucially had an extra point blocked after the touchdown to go up 19-16 in the fourth quarter. Offensive tackle Wanya Morris lined up next to the center on the try, and while teams can overload offensive linemen on these block attempts, the Broncos actually twisted one of the linemen over Morris to the other side of the line, leaving him to help on just one defender. He didn’t get enough on that defender, Frank Crum, who ended up making a critical block. The entire endgame scenario might play out differently if the Broncos needed a touchdown as opposed to settling for a field goal.
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The Chiefs are better in some ways, of course, especially on the offensive side of the ball. Josh Simmons has been an upgrade at left tackle, and while he missed time while addressing a situation away from the game, the first-round rookie returned to the lineup on Sunday and delivered a credible job against a fierce set of Broncos edge rushers. Simmons allowed one quick pressure on 48 Mahomes dropbacks. A year ago, in this same game, Kingsley Suamataia filled in for an injured Morris and allowed three quick pressures and a sack at left tackle.
Mahomes has also delivered on his offseason pledge to take more shots downfield. While he was only 1-of-6 on deep passes against the Broncos, the one he hit was a 61-yard completion to Tyquan Thornton, who ran past McMillan for the longest completion of the day. Mahomes also picked up 40- and 47-yard pass interference penalties on throws downfield against Riley Moss. The three Kansas City scoring drives all featured at least one downfield completion or PI penalty, as the Chiefs weren’t otherwise able to string together lengthy drives of shorter conversions.
Mahomes has 17 completions on throws of 20 air yards or more this season, and his QBR on those throws is good for third best in the league. A year ago, he aired it out for only 12 of those completions all season, and his QBR was all the way back in 28th. He was 27th the prior season, too. But at the same time, Mahomes did miss Xavier Worthy and Thornton for what could have been long completions on the opening drive, which might have changed the complexion of the matchup.
Do quarterbacks like Mahomes ever come up short?
It depends on how many quarterbacks you’re willing to put in his company. FPI gave the Chiefs a 23.9% chance of missing the playoffs before the season, but that’s also allowing for some possibility of Mahomes getting injured. If you polled fans in August and asked them whether a Chiefs team with a healthy Mahomes was going to miss the postseason, I suspect you would have had to work for a few hours before you found someone who actually believed that was a possibility.
Mahomes felt like a preseason lock to make the playoffs because he has never really come close to missing them. The Chiefs were a top-three seed at this point of the season in six of his first seven years as the starting quarterback in Kansas City. The Broncos or Chargers winning the division might have been plausible enough, but leaving spite or schadenfreude aside, nobody was projecting the Chiefs to miss out on the playoffs this summer — and with good reason.
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Lamar Jackson and the Ravens have been too good in the regular season to string together many losses, but they were 6-5 in 2020 after a frustrating loss to the Steelers. Like Allen in Buffalo, Jackson and the Ravens got to work and won their final five games of the season, finishing 11-5. They then beat an 11-5 Titans team on the road for Jackson’s first playoff win before losing to the Bills in the divisional round.
Obviously, other legendary quarterbacks missing the playoffs wouldn’t make doing so any more damaging or disastrous for the Chiefs and Mahomes right now. It would be truly stunning, in part because the guy we’ve designated as the best quarterback in football at any given moment probably hasn’t missed the playoffs in a healthy season since Elway or Montana. This is all eye-of-the-beholder stuff in terms of who’s the best, but we’ve probably been a little spoiled by how consistently great Brady and Mahomes were at winning their respective divisions and making it to the playoffs on an annual basis.
Are the Chiefs going to miss the playoffs?
I don’t think so. FPI gives them a 55.4% chance of making the postseason. Obviously, there’s always the potential of Mahomes going down injured, which would tank Kansas City’s chances altogether. There’s a chance that we end up in some super tiebreaker that algorithms won’t encounter very often, which probably wouldn’t favor the Chiefs given their record against so many of the other teams in the wild-card hunt. And with their divisional odds down to 9.1%, the Chargers-Broncos rematch in Week 18 could be with the AFC West title on the line. It would take something truly drastic for the Chiefs to get back in that race, though we could have said the same thing about the Bills in 2023, and they managed to sneak ahead of the Dolphins in Week 18 for the AFC East title.
With seven games to go, though, the schedule does get a little bit easier from here on out. The Colts are no pushovers and are coming off a bye of their own, although Daniel Jones has struggled badly over the past two weeks. The Chiefs get the Cowboys, Titans and Raiders on the road between now and the end of the year, and while there’s no such thing as a gimme game for a 5-5 team, the 2025 Chiefs have dominated bad teams in a way that the 2024 Chiefs did not.
The Chiefs’ tougher games — the Colts, Texans, Chargers and that rematch with the Broncos — are all at Arrowhead. That’s a fortuitous turn of events. It wouldn’t be a shock if the Chiefs were favored in each of their seven remaining games. (Although that doesn’t mean they’ll win all seven.)
More than anything, though, the evidence suggests that this is a pretty good football team that has had some very poor timing or sequencing. There isn’t any dominant team in the AFC. The Broncos deserved to win on Sunday and have a fantastic defense, but Nix has been incredibly inconsistent, and Denver has needed late comebacks to beat the likes of the Giants and Jets. The Bills have been sloppy and lost to the Falcons and Dolphins. The Ravens nearly handed a win to the Browns on Sunday. The Chargers were blown out by the Jaguars. The Colts haven’t been able to protect the football of late. The Patriots have played one of the easiest schedules in recent memory.
I wrote at length about many of these teams last week, and these are obviously simplistic one-line analyses. But there’s no team with the sort of undeniable résumé we’ve seen from the great teams in the AFC in past years. Their record is disappointing, but I’m not sure the Chiefs are really much worse than any or all of those teams.
And while they’re not going to suddenly start winning 100% of their close games again, keep in mind that regression toward the mean doesn’t suggest that a 10-0 team in one-score games is going to go 0-10 the following year. The simplest math would expect the Chiefs to win 50% of their close games. I would probably expect that their true talent level and win rate in those one-score contests is a little higher than 50-50. If they play five more one-score games from here on out, the Chiefs are more likely to finish 3-2 in those games than 0-5 or 5-0.
Can they still win the Super Bowl?
As someone who perennially picks the Chiefs to win the Lombardi Trophy — even in years where I simultaneously project their regular-season record to decline — I have to finish up by weighing this side of the equation. If the top tier in the AFC is really a blurry mess and I believe the Chiefs can still be part of it, it doesn’t seem outlandish to suggest that they could get hot and seriously compete in the postseason, as teams quarterbacked by the likes of Allen and Rodgers have done in the past.
0:32
Kareem Hunt finds the end zone for Kansas City
Kareem Hunt stays upright and ties the game for the Chiefs with a rushing touchdown.
Has any team ever gone from 5-5 to a Super Bowl title? Well, one. When I talked about Brady earlier, I didn’t mention his 2001 Patriots, since Brady was a rookie and took over for an injured Drew Bledsoe in Week 2. A loss to the Rams dropped the Patriots to 5-5 in mid-November, but it was the last time Bill Belichick’s team would come up short that season. The Patriots won their final six games of the regular season to finish 11-5 and claim a first-round bye. You’re probably familiar with what happened next. This ends with an upset victory over Warner’s Rams in the Super Bowl.
The 2011 Giants were 6-6 before they got hot and won their second title over Brady’s Patriots, and the 1979 Rams made it to the Super Bowl and lost after starting 5-5. But there’s a reason teams without winning records this late into the season typically aren’t seen deep into the postseason: They usually aren’t very good. The Chiefs might be better than most, but going on the road and winning three times in January is a lot more difficult than hosting two games at Arrowhead. The Chiefs can pull it off if everything coalesces, but it seems more likely that they ride a luckier run of results down the stretch into the playoffs and come up short somewhere before Santa Clara.
Mahomes and this Chiefs team are better than their record, but they might have already done too much damage to make it back to another title game this season.
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