They’re the two-time defending Super Bowl champions and have won the Lombardi Trophy in three of the past five seasons.
They have the best quarterback in the league, and of this generation.
They’re the only remaining team in the NFL with an undefeated record entering Week 8 at 6-0.
And yet the Chiefs haven’t looked very good this year. In particular, quarterback Patrick Mahomes hasn’t looked MVP-worthy.
That makes the Chiefs, as they enter Sunday’s game at Las Vegas, even more scary. What’s going to happen when Mahomes finds his groove, stops turning the ball over and starts slinging a bunch of touchdown passes, playing more to his average — 33 per season the past six years?
And, with the injury-ravaged team having acquired prolific receiver DeAndre Hopkins this past week, what will that mean to their slumping offense?
Hopkins — 943 career receptions and 79 touchdowns — is 32 years old and has been dealing with a knee ailment this season. How productive will he be and how quickly he can contribute is in question.
As it stands, the Chiefs are in commanding position to win the AFC West for the ninth consecutive year — they lead the second-place Broncos (3-3) by three games. A win over the Raiders and they will have a four-game lead on them in the loss column.
Yet, Mahomes has few touchdown passes (six) than he does interceptions (eight, tied for the league lead with the Packers’ Jordan Love and Raiders’ Gardner Minshew).
“There’s been a lot of turnovers, especially by me,’’ Mahomes told reporters after Kansas City defeated the 49ers last Sunday. “I think it’s just showing the versatility of our team. It’s not just about me. It’s not just about the stats and the light show and stuff like that.
“It’s about playing team football, and I believe that if we continue to work, we’ll get better offensively throwing the ball down the field.’’
Mahomes, a two-time NFL MVP and three-time Super Bowl MVP, posted a career-worst 44.4 passer rating against the 49ers and Kansas City won the game anyway. It was the second game in a row in which Mahomes failed to throw a touchdown pass — the first time in his career he has gone back-to-back games with a TD pass. His 82.5 passer rating is the worst of his career.
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Yet, the Chiefs are 6-0 anyway.
What does that say about this team when the offense, which has lost receivers Rashee Rice and JuJu Smith-Schuster as well as top running back Isiah Pacheco to injuries, begins to click?
Even star tight end Travis Kelce, Mahomes’ favorite target, has been virtually invisible this season — other than off the field wherever he is with Taylor Swift.
Kelce has a modest 28 receptions for 245 yards, an average of just 8.8 yards, and he hasn’t yet caught a TD. Those numbers project for a full season to 79 catches for 694 yards and no TDs, and would, by far, be the worst of his career. In his 10 seasons, Kelce has averaged 90.7 receptions for 1,132 yards and 7.4 TDs per season with the Chiefs.
“It’s about us getting better throughout the year and how we can keep getting better from our previous game to now,” Kelce told reporters last week. “There’s a lot of doubters in terms of what we can do offensively right now with the guys that we’ve got, and I think we showed everybody that we can put up points [against the 49ers].”
The Chiefs have an uncharacteristically narrow point differential for an undefeated team through six games — 146 to 103, just a 7.2-point average margin of victory.
Their continued success is directly related to coaching. Head coach Andy Reid is a wizard, and his defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo is perhaps the most underrated and overlooked assistant coach in the league. Kansas City has remained undefeated largely because of the fact that its defense is ranked fifth in the league in points allowed — 17.2 per game.
The Raiders are the last team to have beaten the Chiefs — 20-14 last Christmas in Kansas City. They have won 12 straight since — including the Super Bowl, which was played at the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium, where the Chiefs have won all four against the Raiders.
“They came in and got after us,” Reid recalled of that last loss. “That’s their personality. We didn’t handle that the right way, but I thought we learned from it and got better for it.’’
That is the Chiefs’ way under Reid: constantly getting better. And, getting better off a 6-0 record with a struggling offense is not good news to the rest of the AFC, or the rest of the NFL.
