It was just Tuesday of Super Bowl week, and Chiefs linebacker Reggie Ragland was already fed up with people questioning his team’s defense. When I spoke with him about several members of that defense, and Ragland mentioned that every one of them had a chip on their shoulder, I asked him about the collective chip, and where it came from.

“Oh, yeah. Because we were talked about… everyone was saying some of the worst things possible about this defense. And we just steadily kept running and fighting as a whole. People still want to count us out, to this day. That’s why we love each other, and why we’re so tight. Because we don’t care what anybody says about us.”

Well, they do. And the skepticism regarding Kansas City’s ability to stop Kyle Shanahan’s multi-faceted schemes in Super Bowl LIV is not entirely without merit. This was a team that suffered a heartbreaking loss to the Patriots in the 2018 AFC Championship game when they couldn’t stop Bill Belichick’s crew from scoring the game-winning touchdown in overtime. New England converted three third-and-10 plays on that fateful drive, Patrick Mahomes never got a chance, to respond, and all of a sudden, the Chiefs were off on an off-season reset.

Defensive coordinator Bob Sutton was fired, replaced by Steve Spagnuolo, perhaps best known as the guy who designed the defensive game plans that upset a historically great Patriots offense in Super Bowl XLII. Spagnuolo’s combinations of exotic pressures and interesting coverages were a balm to a Chiefs defense that was out-manned and out-schemed too often in 2018.

Not that things took off right away. Through the 2019 season’s first nine weeks, Kansas City allowed 14 touchdowns and had just six interceptions, though their seven dropped interceptions (tied with Cincinnati for the league lead) was a precursor of better things to come. Kansas City allowed 7.02 yards per attempt, and an opposing QBR of 90.50. Not the worst in the league in any of these departments, but hardly the kind of defense Spagnuolo or head coach Andy Reid wanted. Their opponent completion rate of 62.96% ranked 11th-best in the league.

But from Weeks 10-17, the Chiefs tied with the Ravens for the fewest passing touchdowns allowed with seven, and picked off 10 passes — tied with the Falcons, Browns, Colts, Saints, and Dolphins for the most in that span. They also had seven dropped picks in the second half of the season. Only the Steelers, Packers, and Ravens allowed a lower completion percentage than Kansas City’s 57.36%.

The Chiefs allowed 6.22 yards per attempt — only the Ravens, 49ers, and Steelers were better, and only the Steelers have allowed a lower QBR than Kansas City’s 68.72. The Chiefs’ defensive Positive Play Rate (the percentage of plays in which an opposing offense has Expected Points Added over zero) dropped from 46% to 42%.

Football Outsiders’ Weighted DVOA, which tracks a team’s opponent-adjusted efficiency through the entire season, but places higher weights on a team’s performance from Week 7 on, and amplifies it as the season goes along, has Kansas City’s defense with a corresponding uptick heading into the Super Bowl.

Yes, the Chiefs allowed the Texans to go up on them 24-0 in the divisional round, and then spotted the Titans 10 points to start the 2019 AFC Championship game, but not all of those disasters were on the defense, and Spagnuolo’s crew was able to shut it down when it counted. Now, they face a 49ers team that has hidden quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo through most of the playoffs, and presents a problem with their highly-effective running game for a defense that finished 29th against the run in Football Outsiders’ defensive metrics.

Defensive lineman Chris Jones, who will help to anchor the inside of Kansas City’s run defense — and generally does so at an elite level — shared Ragland’s awareness of, and animosity for, those who would doubt his efforts.

“I’ve had a chip on my shoulder since I came into this league,” said the four-year veteran, who made his first Pro Bowl in 2019. “That’s what gives me an edge, and what keeps me going. The doubters. The naysayers. The people who don’t believe. The critics. The analysts who say the Chiefs don’t have enough — that’s what keeps me going.”

If the 49ers aren’t taking Kansas City’s defense seriously, it sure doesn’t sound like it.

“I see a good defense,” fullback Kyle Juszczyk told me on Tuesday. “I see a good front seven. I have a ton of respect for their linebackers. Every one of those guys is a challenge in the run game. They’re all very good at taking on blocks, and that’s something I’m going to have to deal with. Also, a guy like Frank Clark can really… he can just change games. He’s very disruptive. And then, you look in the secondary with Tyrann Mathieu, who really plays everywhere. He’s almost a position-less player, because he plays in the nickel, he plays safety, he plays dime linebacker. He’s their chess piece on defense, so it really makes it tough to predict what kind of defensive personnel they’re in with him, because he can play so many of those different roles.”

For Spagnuolo, who was last seen in the NFL as the Giants’ defensive coordinator and interim head coach in 2017, the year off in 2018 was a time to recharge his batteries, spend his Mondays watching tape at NFL Films with NFL Matchup producer Greg Cosell, and getting a sense of how to make a modern defense go in different ways.

“It was quite the challenge, and yet very rewarding, being away from the game. It was an emotional challenge, but the reward was, you got a chance to sit back and see things big-picture. When you get in the middle of things, and you’re wrapped up in the week-to-week football, that’s your focus. When you’re out of it, you can see the game of football [in a different way]. I was living outside of Philadelphia, so it was a 40-minute drive to NFL Films. I had access to all the games, and I chose to study things I maybe didn’t get a chance to do. My background is mostly in coaching linebackers and defensive backs, so I spent a lot of time looking at the defensive line.

“And a lot of it was situational football — looking at teams that are really good on third down, really good in red zone. I just took a bunch of notes, and accumulated a lot of knowledge. So, when I got the chance that I did, I would be able to share that film with the players and the coaches. So, that’s been a real asset, that library of film.”

So, when Spagnuolo took over Kansas City’s defense, it wasn’t just about acquiring high-ticket players like Frank Clark and Tyrann Mathieu — it was also about creating the best opportunities for existing players to succeed — something that had not always been done on Sutton’s watch.

“He’s put guys in the right positions to make plays,” Ragland said of Spagnuolo. “He’s found everybody a role so they can make plays. Small role, or a big role. Like blitzing with me at times, and putting me in coverage at times, he made me a better player this year by doing that. He just put us in positions to be successful.”

For Spagnuolo, that was a fairly easy call.

“We came in with an initial system, because you’ve got to begin somewhere,” the coach recalled. “That’s your foundation and your beginning. And you slot the guys where you think they best fit. But you find that it takes being in the heat of the battle – in the game – to find out where the guys fit.

“Reggie was a really good example, and it’s a credit to Reggie, too. People thought Reggie was slotted as a MIKE linebacker. It’s what he did at Alabama. He could have done that for us, too, but it was apparent to us that Anthony Hitchens fit that a little better. And Reggie, going back to Alabama film and looking at things he’d done for us, had a unique ability to do things as a pass-rusher. I didn’t know that coming here, but we figured it out as we went along.

“If you go back and watch Alabama tape, they did that with him. We recognized that, he embraced it, and we’ve been able to do that along the way. It’s helped us.”

Spagnuolo said that while it’s not one player who’s primarily responsible for the defensive turnaround, it’s hard not to cite Mathieu, signed in the offseason after he was cut by the Cardinals in March, 2018 when he wouldn’t take a pay cut, and then spent a season with the Texans. One more guy with a chip on his shoulder, but as Spagnuolo pointed out, Mathieu has used his past to bring a formidable football ethic to the conversation.

“To me, it’s his elite competitiveness and his desire for perfection. If he makes a mistake, you’re gonna know he’s made a mistake because he’ll let you know. He’ll get frustrated, and want to repeat it [the play], and ask if we can do that again until we get it right. I think that’s the mark of any professional, no matter what business you’re in – somebody who strives to be perfect. There can be a downside to that, but for him, all the other guys recognize that he wants to do it right,

“I don’t think it’s one player, one coach, or one anybody. But one guy can have an effect on every other guy, and when they start to elevate what they’re doing, it permeates, and it just goes like that. It’s the ripple effect, and I think Tyrann has that. But I don’t think it was any one guy. I credit the guys who were here a year ago, went through that tough loss, and being that close, and then embracing the newness.”

The newness of the Chiefs’ defensive improvement, as undersold as it has been, is something Chris Jones would like you all to know about. When I asked him if his defense was about to shock the world, he looked at me with an intensity that would make any quarterback nervous, and said definitively:

“We will.”

From the coaches on down, Kansas City’s defense believes together. The players I’ve talked to are far more comfortable talking about others then themselves. And the extent to which they’ve been downplayed, when the statistics and tape in the second half of the season tells a different story, has made for a whole lot of irritated Chiefs.

Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”