Arrowhead Pride
Late in the afternoon on Thanksgiving Day — when most of us were nearly comatose after feasting on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes (and about 16 1/2 slices of pie), the Kansas City Chiefs faced off against Dallas.
As we have seen over and over this season, the Chiefs failed to make crucial plays when they needed them most. Specifically, these included stopping Dallas’ one-two punch: wide receivers CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens.
With the team’s 31-28 loss, Kansas City not only lost the Preston Road Trophy, but its third game of the last four — falling to 6-6 on the season.
Here are five things we learned from Thursday’s ugly loss.
This isn’t a bad thing. It simply is what it is. There are parts of this team that drastically need improvement. That’s not the case with the secondary. If the Chiefs had an awesome pass rush, this might not matter as much. But they don’t.
The secondary has two main problems:
Cornerback Trent McDuffie is awesome, but he is also 5 feet 11 and 193 pounds. So he struggles when he’s up against bigger, elite players like Lamb — who is three inches taller. This may not seem like much, but NFL football is a game of inches. It can be the difference between shutting a guy down and getting roasted to the tune of seven catches for 112 yards and a touchdown.
Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s defense needs an elite safety. Having great safeties like Justin Reid (and before him, Tyrann Mathieu) allowed the defense to work the way Spagnuolo intends. He likes to blitz his cornerbacks — so when he does, he’s trusting his safeties to pick up the receivers. In Thursday’s game, this meant that sometimes, Chamarri Conner was covering Lamb — with late-arriving help from Jaden Hicks. Neither of those players is at Reid or Mathieu’s level. Kansas City needs to invest in a blue-chip safety to captain the secondary — or fix its pass rush so it doesn’t have to blitz defensive backs.
The Chiefs are not bad. They are exhausted.
They are not worn out from playing on a short week. They are worn out from playing in three straight Super Bowls — and battling through one nail-biter after another.
You could see it on quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ face as he sat on the sideline watching the game slip away. This team looks like a legion of warriors who’ve been out on an endless campaign without reinforcements.
Since 2018 (including the playoffs), the Chiefs have played 149 games. That’s 18 more than half of the league’s teams. That’s more than a whole extra season of tough games won and lost — and in those high-stakes, win-or-go-home matchups, Kansas City’s players pushed their bodies to unimaginable extremes.
I don’t think this team has lost the will to fight. But there is only so much a human body...
