The NFL can’t vanquish the Kansas City Chiefs, and that’s because Patrick Mahomes refuses to die in the biggest possible moments.
They really did it again.
There’s somehow so much to say and nothing to say at all about Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs winning their second consecutive Super Bowl, and their third championship in five years. We can talk about how the Chiefs faced the hardest stretch of opponents on the road to winning a championship in history, based off DVOA as Aaron Schatz pointed out.
We can also talk about how the Chiefs won all four of their playoff games against four of the top six teams in EPA per dropback while they sat in 12th in said category. Or maybe we can point out how Kansas City rolled through their opponents while only two players on their roster had north of 50 catches. Travis Kelce and Rashee Rice had 93 and 79 catches, respectively. The next leading receiver/tight end was Noah Gray with 28 catches. The Chiefs also did this all without any player eclipsing 1,000 yards receiving OR 1,000 yards rushing.
As much as everyone thought 2022 was going to be the lull year for the Chiefs, 2023 absolutely felt like that gap year where Kansas City would go backpacking through Europe to find themselves. Kadarius Toney spent all season quite literally dropping the ball and capped it off with social media rants so good he could have his own show on InfoWars in the hour after Alex Jones goes off air after rambling about the sexual identification of caterpillars. Then came the experiments with the likes of Skyy Moore, Richie James, and Justyn Ross, who at some point were only getting snaps because the Chiefs needed 11 guys on the field.
By Christmas, everyone thought the Chiefs had been vanquished. After an embarrassing home loss to the Las Vegas Raiders, it felt like this could be the year where the villain was put down for good. It didn’t take long, though, for the holiday season to feel like Halloween because just when everyone around the league thought they were in the clear, that John Carpenter score started to play. Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson began to nervously glance around the room and look behind them. Then slowly but surely, like Michael Myers in the holiday’s titular films, the Chiefs slowly sat back up and went back on the attack. No matter what you hit them with, what you throw at them, the Chiefs won’t stay down. Instead, they rebounded down the stretch with a vengeance.
They didn’t try to be subtle, they were intentionally brutal with how they beat you- Isiah Pacheco, Rashee Rice, Travis Kelce, and a defense filled with stars under the tutelage of one of the greatest defensive coordinators of all time.
Oddly enough, there was only one man who seemed to be able to subdue the Chiefs- Tom Brady. Yes, much like Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Sam Loomis was the only one capable of incapacitating the murderous mute, Brady is the only one to have beaten the Chiefs more than once in the playoffs, and the only one to do so in the Super Bowl.
Brady’s gone, though. And even when he did beat the Chiefs, it wasn’t a complete vanquish that sent the big bad monster away forever. He and the Patriots escaped with a win in the 2018-19 AFC Championship Game, and then Brady and the Buccaneers beat up a beaten down Chiefs team that put everything on the shoulders of Patrick Mahomes, who spent the evening running for his life while defying physics just to be able to get passes off.
Those defeats only made the Chiefs stronger. It only made the devil’s eyes see red behind that pale, white mask of hate. They were down, but that came with a caveat- they were pissed.
After losing to the Patriots to end their 2018 season, they made it back to the AFC Championship Game and won the Super Bowl over the 49ers in 2019. And after getting humiliated by the Bucs, they revamped and rebuilt their offensive line in one offseason, immediately returning to the AFC Championship Game and coming up shy of another Super Bowl appearance after Joe Burrow and the Bengals stole a win in Arrowhead. I guess we can say that Burrow and the Bengals are the “final girl” that got away at the end of the movie. But when they met again in the sequel, they weren’t so lucky. The Chiefs defeated the Bengals in the 2022-23 AFC Championship Game to get to the Super Bowl, winning their second in four seasons.
Even so, the M.O. had changed for the Chiefs. Gone was the bombs away style of offense that lived and died largely off deep balls from Mahomes to Tyreek Hill- they became more strategic. A more calculated monster that stalked in the shadows rather than using its brute force to slash its way through everything and everyone in its path. At the end of Halloween Kills, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode says that with every life Michael Myers takes, he evolves into something stronger. That is a similar synopsis of the Chiefs over the years. With every season, they’ve become deadlier. Smarter. Scarier. Doing so while completely inversing their style of play, and methods of winning.
Instead of their offense being as subtle as a cannonball to the face, they became a death by a thousand cuts unit. Mahomes became smarter with the football, recognizing he no longer had someone to consistently take the top off the defense. His yards adjusted per attempt of 9.6 led the NFL in 2018. That number came down to 6.9 in 2023, yet his adjusted EPA was higher than that of Lamar Jackson. The Chiefs evolved because their quarterback was able to evolve.
Not only that, but they leaned into their defense that is full of talent. George Karlaftis had 10.5 sacks. Trent McDuffie and L’Jarius Sneed became the best cornerback tandem in the league. They signed Drue Tranquill to fill that specific role as a versatile linebacker. Mike Danna wreaked havoc while Chris Jones helps open up the gaps for him to penetrate. That, along with still having the game’s best quarterback and head coach, is what they rode to another Super Bowl title.
In doing so, the Chiefs left everyone else in the league wondering what else they can possibly do to exorcise this demon. Every time the 49ers’ offense left the field from the start of the second quarter of Super Bowl LVIII onward, they had the lead, and it still wasn’t enough.
Not only did their win on Sunday bring home another Super Bowl for Kansas City, it was the cherry on top of the most impressive run in the history of the NFL playoffs, and it showed the NFL what horror fans already knew- you can’t kill the bogeyman.
