Plan the parade. Kiss your sweetie on the mouth. Send a local street urchin to acquire a goose for the feast. The Chiefs' bullshit is no longer working.
For a little while, it looked like the Chiefs' bullshit was still working. An 0-2 start was an encouraging sign for those of us who do not want devilry to enter into their sports-watching experience. But then the Chiefs won five of their next six games, all by comfortable margins, and doom was once again on the horizon. The possibility of this stupid, boring, under-achieving team Mr. Magoo-ing its way into another Super Bowl was real. Things have shifted dramatically since then, however, and the Chiefs are now 6-7 following last night's 20-10 loss to the Houston Texans, by far their most dispiriting of the season.
This game was a treat for the haters. Patrick Mahomes completed just 14 of his 33 passes, throwing for 160 yards three interceptions. Yummy. The Chiefs punted or turned the ball over on their first four drives of the game, gaining just 41 yards in the process. Mmmmmm that's nice. And even when they did manage to tie the game at 10 late in the third quarter, they came up empty in the clutch, gaining 19 total yards on their next four drives and turning the ball over four times. Don't mind if I do!
Perhaps most satisfying is the fact that this game, like many of the Chiefs' other losses, didn't play out that much differently from the games we saw last season. It's not actually possible for a team to go 15-2 and make the Super Bowl by accident, but the Chiefs came damn close to doing it. This year, however, all those little fortuitous moments that kept the Chiefs alive for so many of last season's one-score wins are breaking in the other direction, and never more obviously than they were on Sunday night. Isaiah Likely's big toe barely brushing the end zone boundary has given way to Jalen Pitre turning his own tipped pass into an interception, Harrison Butker's field goal attempt clanking spectacularly off the upright, Rashee Rice dropping a fourth-down conversion that hit him the hands, and Travis Kelce juggling a pass straight into a defender's arms.
The NFL's playoff probability calculator gives the Chiefs a 15 percent chance to make the postseason, which has them on track to miss the playoffs for the first time since 2014. The shortcomings that the Philadelphia Eagles so brutally and efficiently exposed in Super Bowl 59 have not gone away, but the magic that sustained the Chiefs through all of last season certainly has. What's left is a vision of this team as it actually exists: old, slow, and far too reliant on the breaks of the game going their way. That's no way to keep a dynasty going.
