Arrowhead Pride
The Kansas City Chiefs are still 5-4 after their Week 10 bye. Their 28-21 road loss to the Buffalo Bills in Week 9 still stings.
Eight games remain in the team’s 2025 schedule. On Sunday, Kansas City will be on the road to face the Denver Broncos. Then they’ll host the Indianapolis Colts at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, play the Dallas Cowboys at AT&T Stadium on Thanksgiving evening, return home for matchups with the Houston Texans and the Los Angeles Chargers, travel to Nashville to face the Tennessee Titans, return home for their final regular-season home game against the Broncos and close out the season at Allegiant Stadium against the Las Vegas Raiders.
Let’s take a look at the team’s current playoff picture. As we always do, we’ll use The Athletic’s playoff calculator — an update to the New York Times playoff calculator we’ve used for several years — to help us project what could happen. You can learn more about how it works by clicking here.
As it stands right now, Kansas City has a 75% chance to make the playoffs (down from 78% a week ago), a 25% chance to win the AFC West (28% last week), only a 4% chance to earn the AFC’s single bye (unchanged), and a 7% chance to win Super Bowl LX (unchanged).
Just as they were a week ago, these numbers aren’t particularly encouraging. They have fallen slightly because while Kansas City was on its Week 10 bye, the Broncos, Colts and Chargers all won their games. The probabilities might have fallen a little more, but the Bills, Pittsburgh Steelers and Jacksonville Jaguars all lost their matchups.
These are, of course, not the kinds of probabilities we’re accustomed to seeing. When we began publishing these playoff summaries on November 8 of last season, the Chiefs were 8-0 — and had a greater than 99% chance to make the playoffs, a 97% chance to win the AFC West, an 82% chance to earn the AFC bye, and a 19% chance to win Super Bowl LIX.
But as things now stand, the Chiefs are still on the outside looking in. If the season ended today, the Jaguars (also 5-4 after their 36-29 loss to the Texans on Sunday) would slip in ahead of Kansas City because of their head-to-head win over the Chiefs in Week 5.
Still, the probabilities show us there’s still a good chance for Kansas City to make the playoffs — and a fighting chance to win the division, too.
The playoff calculator allows us to assume the outcomes of remaining games and see how it changes the odds. For now, we’ll mostly focus on what’s in the team’s control; it’s still too early for complex scenarios.
Let’s take a look.
As strange as it may seem, Kansas City is still in control of making the dance. Winning all of its remaining games will give the team...
