There was a time when winning the season opener would have been a big deal for the Kansas City Chiefs. It would have been the type of thing that warranted some celebration and perhaps distractions throughout the locker room.
Now things are different.
You’ve got coaches, who are proud, but unsatisfied with the product on the field. You’ve got players who are pissed off because winning isn’t good enough. You’ve got others who know that there are areas they can clean up as they hit the road for the first time in Week 2. It’s a different culture in Kansas City, one that has sparked a new era of success.
Andy Reid kicked things off after the game and was the first to say that there is a lot this team can work on.
“Listen, I’m proud of our guys, but we have a ton of things we can work on, so that’s a plus,” Reid told reporters. “And these guys are willing to do that. They know that. And once they have a chance to look at the tape and see what they’ve got, they’ll hit the drawing board, as you’d say, and get busy on working on those things. The coaches likewise—we’re all knocking the rust off. But I’m proud of the guys. I don’t want to take away from that, I’m proud of how they handled this.”
For the players, defensive leader Tyrann Mathieu’s words rang the loudest. He wasn’t satisfied with the defensive performance, namely in the fourth quarter of play.
“I’m pissed off,” Mathieu said. “I felt like we played fairly decent up until the last couple of stretches in the fourth quarter. We started giving up big plays, big chunks, things that we weren’t necesarily doing throughout the game. So in my mind, we’ve got a lot more work to do. I felt like if we would have held those guys to seven points it would have been a much better feeling. I think those guys scoring 20 kind of leaves a bad taste in our mouth. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m looking forward to next week.”
Patrick Mahomes pointed to a few misfires, including one where he failed to identify a blitz pre-snap and make adjustments.
“Yeah, I mean there’s just some missed opportunities here and there,” Mahomes said. “I mean, obviously the D Rob (Demarcus Robinson) touchdown, he made a heck of a play and just didn’t finish it off at the end of the thing. We had another drive where I didn’t pick up a blitz the right way. I had to throw it hot and flat to Darrel (Williams) and if I had it picked up, we had guys open downfield. I mean you want to score every single time you’re out there, but I think the good thing about the game today is it was a good game, offense, defense and special teams and we were able to go out there and play off of each other. We chewed up some clock, gave the defense a rest and they went out there and made a lot of stuff happened.”
Even the rookies, fresh off their first NFL game, spent the postgame talking about the ways they could get better for next week. L’Jarius Sneed already had one thing in mind that he wanted to work on.
“My leverage, you know when you get splits with two wide receivers, I want my leverage inside to outside,” Sneed said. “We’ll watch the film tonight – as soon as I leave tonight – learning from my mistakes that I made and keep going on to the next opponent.”
Edwards-Helaire didn’t have anything specific in mind, but he knows that getting better week-to-week is what football is all about.
“Oh yeah, no doubt, that’s football,” Chiefs RB Clyde Edwards-Helaire said. “That’s part of it. You can’t be 100 percent perfect on everything. Everybody is going to have something to go back and look at. As far as right off the jump, I really can’t pinpoint. But I’m going to go home, look at the film, literally go through every play. Write some things down. Probably shoot a couple of texts to Deland (McCullough). Other than that, prepare for next weekend and whatever adjustments I need to make, make sure I don’t have those same things show up on film.”
It’s as clear as day that this team has their mind right after a Week 1 win. This was just one step in a season-long journey to Super Bowl LV. The Chiefs are off to a solid start, but they know there are things that they can tighten to ensure their success lasts throughout the year.
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