The Kansas City Chiefs will get to play an AFC team that they haven’t played during the course of the 2020 season in the divisional round.
Kansas City is set to host the Cleveland Browns in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs on Sunday, January 17 at 2:05 p.m. CT on CBS, CBS All Access and ESPN Deportes. The Browns’ stunning 48-37 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the wild-card round means that they’ll visit the top-seeded Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium.
These teams don’t have much recent history playing each other. Kansas City played their last game against Cleveland during Week 9 of the 2018 season. It was a 37-21 win for the Chiefs with a two-touchdown performance from Ohio-native Travis Kelce. Gregg Williams had just taken over the team after the Browns fired Hue Jackson following a 2-5-1 start to the season.
This group hasn’t faced a Cleveland team coached by Kevin Stefanski before. They did, however, face a Stefanski offense in 2019 when he was the offensive coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings. They won that game 26-23 at Arrowhead Stadium with backup QB Matt Moore running the offense.
There are a ton of other interesting storylines surrounding this game too. One of the most prominent will be about both quarterbacks. Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes and Browns QB Baker Mayfield were teammates at Texas Tech under now-Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury. Mayfield transferred to Oklahoma in 2014, the year that Mahomes won the starting job at TTU. When the two quarterbacks played against each other in college it was a record-breaking shootout with the most combined yardage in a single game in NCAA Division I history (1,708).
Then, of course, there’s Kareem Hunt’s return to Arrowhead Stadium. Hunt was released by the Chiefs back in 2018 after TMZ released a video of him shoving and kicking a girl in a Cleveland hotel. Hunt eventually cleaned up his act and ended up with his hometown Browns. He has played there for the past two seasons and carved out a nice role for himself in the offense. He’ll surely have something to prove to his former team, which will make for a fun storyline to watch.
All-in-all this should make for an exciting drama-filled game. The two teams boast different styles of offenses that can be equally deadly on any given Sunday.
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