Arrowhead Pride
Ahead of the Kansas City Chiefs’ season finale against the Las Vegas Raiders in Week 18, the team’s three coordinators took questions from the press for the final time during the 2025 season.
Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo assured his listeners that even though neither team has a playoff stake in this game, there will be plenty at stake in Las Vegas.
“We’re fighting for some things in this last game that we want to hang our hat on,” he explained. “I’m not a big stat guy — I don’t go into them — but I hear the guys talking about it, so there’s a lot of pride there in this last game.”
The Chiefs are one of only six NFL teams that have allowed less than 20 points per game this season. If that holds, it would be the third consecutive season Kansas City has hit that benchmark — after a stretch of three years allowing 22 points per game.
With only a 6-10 record to show for it, a celebration may not be warranted. Still, Spagnuolo’s unit was a key reason many of the Chiefs’ battles remained close.
“There were some really good stretches of defense,” he noted. “I go back to the Indianapolis Colts game where we had those five or six straight three-and-outs. There were some games in there where we played winning football and helped our team get in a position to win.”
Unfortunately, Kansas City had a 1-8 record in one-score games.
“What was disappointing — I haven’t gone back and reflected on all of it — was some end-of-game defense that I would have liked to have back,” said Spagnuolo. “If we could have found a way to make one play towards the end of the game, it either would have given our offense the ball back or we would have found a way to win the game. That more than anything sticks out. If we can get better at that, I’ll be happy.”
The Chiefs’ special teams coordinator Dave Toub shared that sentiment from a different perspective.
“We just didn’t make plays,” he told reporters. “We just couldn’t get a game where we made plays to win the game — and I’m just speaking on my end of it. In the past, we’ve done that a lot of times. The way we started out in Brazil — with the fast field goal that we did? That was awesome. That was cutting-edge… then [Harrison] Butker ends up missing five kicks in September. That was like a Debbie Downer right there.”
Among the nine kicks Butker has missed in the 2025 season, five occurred in September. That set up the veteran kicker for criticism throughout the year.
“It says something that he got off to a bad start,” said Toub, “[and] then it was always there: the doubt, ‘Is he going to make it or is he not?’ Then he had a good string in October and November [before] it popped up again in December....
