The Chiefs offense—not its defense—is looking like it will be their Achilles heel in the playoffs
The Chiefs offense is running out of time to get back on the winning path.
The Chiefs are in a weird spot right now as the 2021 NFL regular season starts to reach the end.
Kansas City is 8-4, in first place in the AFC West, still has a chance at the No. 1 seed and the defense is on a hot streak of playing excellent football after getting shredded by everyone to start the year.
If all these facts applied to the Chiefs in any other year, they would likely be overwhelming favorites to win the AFC and potentially winning the Super Bowl with a combination of overwhelming offense and defense.
However, that’s not quite the case this year.
The Chiefs’ offense has sputtered and been slow to get moving, hardly looking like the explosive offense that everyone has become accustomed to over the past three seasons.
According to Ben Baldwin of The Athletic, the Chiefs are still scoring well in terms of some of the more advanced numbers. They rank 7th in expected points added per play (0.091) and second in success rate (51.7%), but they aren’t the defense-razing machine that’s took the NFL by storm once Patrick Mahomes took over in 2018.
Sunday night’s game against the Broncos was the perfect encapsulation of what is a little bit off about this Chiefs team. Yes, they won 22-9, but the offense only contributed one touchdown — a Mahomes scramble that came halfway through the first quarter.
Outside of that, the offense couldn’t really get much going. Part of this is because the Broncos have one of the better defenses in the league and Vic Fangio is familiar with the Chiefs’ offense at this point in his tenure. However, this just hasn’t been the same Chiefs offense from years past.
As Baldwin’s stats showed, this offense is still fine when looking at the season as a whole. They’re still able to move the ball, they just haven’t been scoring as many points. As their games against the Broncos, Titans, Cowboys, Packers and Giants showed, this team is vulnerable in a one game sample like the playoffs will present.
The weird thing with the Chiefs offense is that they’ve struggled to put together complete games. Sometimes Mahomes scorches opposing secondaries while the ground game can’t get anything going. Other times it’s opposite. The Chiefs are still winning games, but they don’t look invincible.
The Chiefs are on a five game winning streak, but they have eclipsed 22 points just one time in those five games — a 41-14 shellacking of the Raiders. In the other four games, they’ve scored just 74 points, which is obviously uncharacteristically bad for this team.
On the surface, everything looks the same. Mahomes is still out there throwing passes to Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill. Clyde Edwards-Helaire is back and has had some solid games. But they can’t get the ball into the end zone.
Luckily for the Chiefs, they still have all the ingredients to figure this out and get back to being the dominant, insurmountable force that struck fear into the heart of defenses. There are worse problems to have than getting a group of Pro Bowlers and future Hall of Famers back on the same page.
But they still have to do it. Right now, it’s the offense that has the Chiefs looking beatable in January and February, not the defense.