With a stunning victory over the Denver Broncos on Sunday afternoon, the Kansas City Chiefs escaped with their eighth come-from-behind win this season, and their ninth straight victory to start the 2024 campaign. And now that half of the regular season is in the books, it's officially time to start wondering aloud whether we're on the verge of a hallowed perfect season.
Please note that the key word in the title of this piece is could, not will. Only two teams in the Super Bowl-era have completed an undefeated regular season, so it's not as if this is something we should just brush off as some sort of regular occurrence. Plus, if you dig deep into the results of these games, it's easy to see that this is not a team that resembles many of the powerhouses who have reached the halfway point of the NFL season unblemished in the past.
Case in point: in the 100-plus year history of the NFL, 34 teams have started a season 9-0, and the Chiefs have the worst point differential (+58) of all 34 of those teams, per Jarrett Bell of USA Today.
In order to get to 9-0, Kansas City has had to get by with a blocked field goal at the gun. They've benefitted from Isaiah Likely's cleat being one size too big. They've been on the right side of controversial penalties and non-penalties that have either kept drives going or wrapped games up. They survived in overtime against a short-handed Buccaneers team in Week 9, and capitalized on a Brock Purdy collapse in a Super Bowl rematch.
The raw numbers don't do the Chiefs any favors either. Patrick Mahomes is throwing for fewer yards, fewer touchdowns and more interceptions on a per game basis than he has at any point in his career. Travis Kelce spent the opening two months of the season looking really old, and no, that has nothing to do with his relationship with Taylor Swift. The rest of the offense has been decimated by injuries, with Isaiah Pacheco, Rashee Rice and Hollywood Brown all missing large chunks of time.
The defense has been stout, and it continues to make plays when the team needs them most. Steve Spagnuolo's group has long been underrated and underappreciated, but even this year, by the numbers, the defense hasn't been quite as good.
Here's the thing though… I'm not sitting here typing away on my keyboard preparing to tell you why the Chiefs will go undefeated. I'm just here to tell you that if you're looking at all of the numbers and all of the results and all of the reasons why they can't go undefeated, you haven't been paying close enough attention to what's been going on in Kansas City, Missouri for the past five years.
The Kansas City Chiefs have perfected the art of ‘finding a way to win'
Instead of looking at the things that can be seen and proven, I instead want to focus on something more intangible, because there's no way around the fact that there's a certain quality to this Chiefs organization that seems to transcend the ways we normally evaluate teams.
If there weren't a well-established track record that extends back half a decade ago, the idea of this team completing an undefeated regular season would seem crazy, even though they are halfway there. But because of what we know about this team and their Jordan-esque knack for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, you're fooling yourself if you don't think that they could continue to win games by the skin of their teeth on the way to a perfect 17-0 regular season.
This isn't a one season aberration. This is a year over year trend that the Chiefs have managed to keep up since Patrick Mahomes took over for Alex Smith at the start of the 2018 season. They have an uncanny knack for winning games that they shouldn't. Just ask the Buffalo Bills. Or the Baltimore Ravens. Or the Los Angeles Chargers. Or the San Francisco 49ers. Just about every team that has crossed paths with the Chiefs has gotten burned at some point.
The remaining schedule is by no means a cakewalk. Kansas City heads to Buffalo this Sunday, where they are and should be the underdogs. They've got games remaining against a pair of division foes — Denver and Los Angeles — who have pushed the Chiefs to the brink already this season, as well as matchups with Houston and Pittsburgh. Shoot, the Chiefs have played down to the level of their competition so often this season, it's not out of the question that they'd drop a game to Cleveland or Carolina.
Conventional wisdom says that KC will lose at least one of these remaining eight games. But conventional wisdom, as well as the analytics, say that the Chiefs should've lost about three times already this season.
Why would they start losing now?
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