Last season, the Kansas City Chiefs made the Super Bowl, just as they had in 2024, and 2023, and 2021, and 2020. (It could have been five straight if they hadn’t blown an eighteen-point lead in the 2022 A.F.C. Championship Game.) They finished the 2024 regular season with a 15–2 record, which suggests that they were very good. They were not actually very good. Also, nobody likes them.
Maybe not nobody. Taylor Swift likes them. Also, it seems that somebody in the N.F.L.’s league office likes them, because the Chiefs are scheduled to play in more high-profile games this season than any other team. They started the season in São Paulo, Brazil, playing the Los Angeles Chargers, on the vanguard of the N.F.L.’s imperial ambitions. They played the Eagles in Week Two, in a rematch of the Super Bowl on Fox. They play in the prime Sunday-night slot three times, and on Monday Night Football twice. They’ll take on the Dallas Cowboys during the Thanksgiving afternoon game, traditionally the biggest game of the year. And for good measure, they’ll play the Broncos on Christmas. And, it seems for good reason: their game against the Eagles drew an audience of nearly thirty-four million, the most ever for a regular-season Sunday game on Fox. But it’s safe to say that not everyone watching them was rooting for them. There had been a time when a lot of people loved the Chiefs. They were the fun, thrilling underdogs that ended the long, joyless dynasty of the New England Patriots. They had a quarterback who could improvise the way Michael Jordan could dunk. But, as the Chiefs tried for an unprecedented Super Bowl three-peat last season, they became the team that people loved to hate.
There were some obvious reasons: Patrick Mahomes’s terrible State Farm commercials; exposure fatigue; the small explosions of rage that occur in some men’s brains whenever Swift’s success is mentioned. There was also, perhaps, general irritation at the idea that such a successful team should be the recipient of so much dumb luck. Twelve of the Chiefs’ wins last season, if you include the playoffs, were by a single score. They won one game with a blocked chip-shot field goal. They won another by the length of a toe. Mahomes, whose unparalleled genius involves the ability to morph into whatever kind of quarterback his team needs to be, morphed into a system Q.B. who threw checkdowns and dramatically crumbled whenever a ref was around. “If winning football games makes you a villain, we’re going to keep going out there and doing it,” Mahomes said. There were rumors that the Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce, Swift’s Ken, who also happens to be a future Hall of Famer, would pop the question on the field if his team won the Super Bowl. Instead, Kelce had to settle for proposing after recording a podcast. The Chiefs were blown out by the Philadelphia Eagles—at one point, the score was 34–0—and Kelce was spotted on the sidelines screaming at and bumping the Chiefs’ coach, Andy Reid.
That was dismissed as the passion of a very competitive (and, to judge from Swift’s lyricsvery passionate) man. But it could be seen as the expression of something else: symptomatic behavior of a team on which nobody is having much fun on the field anymore. Certainly not Kelce, who had been caught in more shouting incidents earlier this season. Kelce, in his mid-thirties, has been forced into carrying an unusually heavy offensive burden—not least because he slammed into the team’s 2024 first-round draft pick, the wide receiver Xavier Worthy, on a crossing route during their first game of the season, which left Worthy with a dislocated shoulder. Another top wide receiver, Rashee Rice, started the season with a six-game suspension for violating the league’s personal-conduct policy owing to his role in a multicar crash in Dallas during the 2024 off-season. The team’s running backs have been so ineffective that Mahomes was the team’s leading rusher through the first five games. And the defense, the team’s greatest strength last season, at least until the Super Bowl, has been a sieve against the run.
The team, however, has excelled in committing penalties—the fourth most in the league. The Chiefs drew thirteen flags during Monday night’s game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, including one that put the Jaguars, down by four, on the one-yard line with thirty seconds left. On the next play, Trevor Lawrence, the Jags’ quarterback, stumbled back and fell to the ground. He then frantically tried to get up and nearly lost the ball in the process. Finally, he got to his feet, and hurtled toward the end zone, as Chris Jones, the Chiefs’ All-Pro defensive tackle, sauntered near the goal line, thinking the play was over. Lawrence dove into the end zone. The Jaguars won 31–28, dropping the Chiefs to a 2–3 record.
The losing record means about as much as the Chiefs’ sterling one did last season: not very much. The first loss of the season, to the Chargers, was a one-score loss to an inspired quarterback in Brazil. The second was a one-score loss to the Eagles. The Chiefs had two convincing wins before losing to the Jaguars—and, in that game, the Chiefs dominated the Jaguars by almost every metric except the score, outgaining them by 476–319 yards. Mahomes has been doing Mahomesian things, and has been throwing downfield more often than last season, and into tighter windows. Since 1990, only twelve per cent of teams that started the season 0–2 have made the playoffs, but the Chiefs have a good chance of becoming one of them. They play in a weak division, and should soon see their ceiling rise when Rice returns. The Chiefs come into their game against the Detroit Lions, one of the best teams in the league, as slight favorites. Regardless of how the Chiefs perform this weekend, their season isn’t over.
