The Kansas City Chiefs are the new New England Patriots.
Absurd franchise quarterback? Check. Respected veteran head coach? Yep. Defense that shows up to crush your dreams when it matters most? Correct. General feeling of inevitability? Yeah, that too.
Like Tom Brady before him, Patrick Mahomes has become a constant in AFC title games. The Chiefs have made it to the league’s final four each of the last six years. They’ve made it to the Super Bowl four of the last five and won it thrice. And like those prime Brady Pats, their window doesn’t seem to be closing anytime soon.
Mahomes, even in a down year, still ended his season with a parade through western Missouri. Travis Kelce continued to be an abject terror despite countless double teams and weekly podcast duties. And, in a new fun twist for the rest of the league, the Kansas City defense emerged as one of the league’s most imposing units.
Things don’t look like they’ll get any easier for the rest of the AFC in 2024.
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The Chiefs made the difficult decision to trade Tyreek Hill before he signed a four year, $120 million contract with the Miami Dolphins in 2022. This robbed Mahomes of his most dynamic deep threat, and over the last two seasons Kansas City’s downfield passing has suffered. Mahomes’ average target distance dropped to a career worst 6.5 yards beyond the line of scrimmage last season (third lowest among starting quarterbacks). His 56 deep throws and 17 deep completions were also career lows.
It was easy to understand what necessitated the change. Hill’s departure put the receiving corps in the hands of players like JuJu Smith-Schuster, Skyy Moore, Kadarius Toney, Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Rashee Rice. Mahomes still managed to win an MVP with those first four guys in the lineup. Then Rice emerged as his WR1 as a rookie — but almost exclusively as a short range target.
Rice’s average catch came only 3.8 yards downfield, but he still turned that into big production in his NFL debut. His 2.39 yards per route run (YPRR) were 10th best in the league, showcasing not only his ability to get open but Mahomes’ ability to find him and deliver the ball into these windows.
But even with Rice thriving in the short range and Kelce a beast in the intermediate range and free agent Marquise Brown capable of filling up a route tree, there left one final piece of the puzzle. Valdes-Scantling was supposed to provide some semblance of a deep game, but in 2023 he bottomed out to career lows of 21 catches and 15 yards per reception. Enter Xavier Worthy.
MAHOMES TO WORTHY
This is gonna be fun.
: #DETvsKC on @NFLNetwork
: Stream on #NFLPlus pic.twitter.com/gYsUZOk5k5— NFL (@NFL) August 17, 2024
For reference, the Chiefs have finally replaced Hill’s 4.29-second 40-yard dash speed with Worthy’s 4.21-second 40 speed. Obviously there’s no guarantee that will translate to the NFL, but it did result in more than 900 receiving yards per season in three years at Texas. Kansas City needed a player who can coax more deep throws out of Mahomes and create space for the team’s other pass catchers to thrive. Worthy is capable of this.
Even if he struggles — and Rice misses time thanks to league discipline related to an offseason reckless driving arrest — we know the Chiefs offense will be fine because (gestures broadly at the last two years). Isiah Pacheco, a tailback who runs like a possessed child in a horror movie, posted a top 10 rushing yards over expected (RYOE) while proving he could handle an expanded workload. He gets to run behind one of the league’s top interior blocking schemes behind Joe Thuney, Creed Humphrey and Trey Smith. That’s a big deal; the Chiefs are 14-1 when he averages more than five yards per carry in a game.
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Kansas City finished 2024 ranked second in both points and yards allowed. Chris Jones and Trent McDuffie (acquired after a trade up involving the draft pick gleaned in the Hill trade) were both first-team All-Pros. George Karlaftis broke out for 10.5 sacks. The Chiefs won four games last season in which they failed to score at least 20 points; that had only happened four times the previous nine years.
Still, while that unit was very good it wasn’t quite elite. Against the pass, Kansas City was a top three operation. Against the run, it failed to crack the top 25:
via rbsdm.com and the author.
We saw this in the team’s losses last fall. The Denver Broncos and Las Vegas Raiders each won rock fights in which their own passing games failed to generate more than 100 yards of offense. It didn’t matter because their run games did enough to overcome a sputtering Kansas City scoring attack. Denver rode multiple four-plus minute drives in the final 19 minutes of its second game against the Chiefs despite three net passing yards in that stretch, turning a 14-9 lead into a 24-9 win. Half a season later, Zamir White had the best game of his career, rushing for 145 yards in an otherwise unwatchable Christmas Day game.
Head coach Andy Reid is hoping this is a problem that fixes itself with in-house development. Contributors like Willie Gay and Mike Edwards left in free agency while the Chiefs mostly stood pat when it came to adding veteran defensive help. Only two of the team’s seven 2024 draftees came on the defensive side of the ball and each (defensive backs Jaden Wicks and Kamal Hadden) were Day 3 selections.
Instead, the onus will fall on Nick Bolton, third-year linebacker Leo Chenal and 2023 free agent addition Drue Tranquill. Bolton’s return from injury will be an obvious boost; his 3.2 percent missed tackle rate was the lowest of any Chiefs regular last season (he’s yet to post a rate higher than four percent in his NFL career). Chenal made strides in his second season and should be even better this fall. Tranquill is capable of dizzying highs and moderate lows but mostly is a reliable veteran who gets where he needs to be.
The easiest way, of course, to reduce this liability will be to force opponents into playing from behind and limit the amount of designed runs that unit sees. Forcing more dropbacks means jamming opponents into the gears of Kansas City’s machine, where Jones, McDuffie, Karlaftis, Bolton and Justin Reid await.
But it’s fair to worry about a secondary that lost its most disruptive member (L’Jarius Sneed, traded to the Tennessee Titans) and will instead rely on recent draftees like Bryan Cook, Nazeeh Johnson, Chamarri Conner, Joshua Williams, Jaylen Watson and Nic Jones. The hope is Reid and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo can put a few of those guys on the Sneed development track, but there’s a good chance the defensive backfield sees its share of growing pains this fall.
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Those defensive concerns are almost a moot point if the offense matches expectations. Worthy doesn’t need to be Tyreek Hill to succeed in Kansas City; he just needs to be better respected by opposing defenses than Valdes-Scantling was. Rice doesn’t need to drastically improve in his second season; he just has to be the same run-after-catch savant he was to finish 2023.
If that comes into focus, the defense can regress from last year’s top-two scoring unit. Questions will follow its secondary into 2024, but they can be erased if Mahomes continues to trash opponents’ secondaries this fall. And everything we’ve seen the last six years suggests, yep, that’s probably what will happen.
