Arrowhead Pride
What is Arrowhead Pride Premier? Arrowhead Pride Premier is our tri-weekly newsletter, one that provides analysis and exclusive insights directly from Arrowhead Stadium, delivered straight to your inbox. Below is a preview of the latest edition. Here was our midweek preview.
BY PETE SWEENEY
The NFL schedule can be funny sometimes.
Following their first loss of the season, the Kansas City Chiefs travel to take on the Carolina Panthers on Sunday. The matchup is intriguing in the sense that these are two franchises heading in very different directions, but their most recent results would indicate the opposite.
The Chiefs narrowly defeated a Broncos team playing .500 football and lost to the Buffalo Bills, whereas the Panthers have won two games in a row for the first time since 2021.
Regardless of that quirk, this still very much projects as a classic “get-right” game for the Chiefs. There are a number of things you could point to that didn’t go quite right against the Bills.
Against a Panthers team that ranks 29th in points per game, 32nd in points allowed, 27th in PFF offensive grade and 32nd in PFF defensive grade, gaining confidence in some of those areas seems ripe for the taking.
For this newsletter previewing such a lopsided matchup, here are things I would like to see from Kansas City so they fly home from Carolina feeling like they indeed “got right.”
I would like to see the Chiefs stick to running the football – because that is when the offense is at its best.
The Chiefs have played 10 games this season, and the two-time MVP has finished only two without an interception. As a team, Kansas City has played one single turnover-free game.
Mahomes’ early pick against the Bills felt like a moment Kansas City could never really recover from at the game played out. And it impacted the plan.
“We didn’t run a ton of plays this last game, so with the interception kind of stalling out that drive quickly and then kind of how the flow of the game was, we probably threw the ball more than we might have wanted to from the beginning of the game,” said Mahomes on Wednesday. “I thought coach (Andy Reid) did a good job of getting the run game back going as the game went on, which opened up other things as well.”
At halftime, Kareem Hunt had seven carries, and he finished with 14. This was after four straight games of 20 rushing attempts or more.
“I think more than anything, just having the offensive line that we have and those three guys in the middle running downhill (Trey Smith, Creed Humphrey and Joe Thuney) is hard for defenses to account for. If we can run the ball downhill it opens up everything else.
“I think Kareem [Hunt] and all of those guys do a great job of doing that. You kind of have to play the flow of the...
