Kansas City has not kicked off, and our model already dropped the Chiefs another win
Updated
For the better part of a decade betting against Kansas City has been a good way to lose money, and the market is still pricing the Chiefs like the outfit that owned the AFC. Our model stepped off that bandwagon in July at eight wins, and when we re-ran the season with the rest of Week 1 in the books, before Kansas City had played a snap in Denver, it stepped further off. The Chiefs now project for seven and a half wins, a losing record with a 17 percent playoff chance, and the reason is not anything Patrick Mahomes did or did not do on Monday night. It is that the division and the conference got better around a roster that had already thinned.
Mahomes remains Mahomes, and the projection still says so within the limits of what is around him. Our model has him at 3,743 yards and 18 touchdowns against eleven interceptions behind a passer rating near 89, with another 481 yards and six scores on the ground. That is a top-five player producing a good line rather than a historic one, and the offense as a whole projects for 327 points, 24th in the league, with the 24th-most yards. In July we called the offense merely good at 14th. After watching the rest of the league in Week 1, the model calls it bottom-third, and that is the whole extra win.
The skill talent is the same group we described in the summer. Rashee Rice holds at 99 catches for 1,149 yards, the centerpiece now. Xavier Worthy adds 58 catches. Travis Kelce, in the twilight, still projects for 55 grabs and five scores as the red zone answer. Kenneth Walker III carries the ground game at 1,102 yards and ten touchdowns. It is a good group. It is not the murderer's row that once made Kansas City impossible to defend, and one more week of evidence from other teams' offenses only made the gap clearer.
The defense is where the erosion happened, and nothing about the offseason losses has been repaired by September. Trent McDuffie, Bryan Cook, Jaylen Watson, Nohl Williams, Charles Omenihu and Leo Chenal are all gone, and our model projects Kansas City allowing 361 points, 15th in the league, while giving up the 27th-most yards. Chris Jones and George Karlaftis still project for ten and eleven sacks, Alohi Gilman for five interceptions, and the pass rush keeps the unit respectable. But a unit that surrenders that many yards is one that bends every week and eventually breaks, and against elite quarterbacks the coverage is the difference between a ten-win team and a seven-win one.
The division is the sharper problem. Denver sat out Week 1 and still climbed to the best title odds in the AFC in our projection, with a top-seven defense and a receiver in Jaylen Waddle who now projects for 1,700 yards. The Chargers lost to Arizona but still have Justin Herbert. The Raiders beat Miami. Kansas City no longer gets to feast on a weak neighborhood, and when we ran the rest of the season the six divisional games were coin flips at best, with the two against Denver leaning the other way.
The market opened Kansas City above ten wins, and in July we sat two under it. Now we sit three under, and the bearish lean is anchored to the same personnel losses it was anchored to in the summer plus a league that looked faster than the Chiefs on the first Sunday. Vegas is still charging a premium for the brand and for the memory of three titles. Our model prices the players on the field, and the players on the field, particularly in coverage, are a step down from the group that made Kansas City a machine.
The path to being wrong is short and it is named Mahomes. If Rice is a true star, if the pass rush covers for the young corners, and if the quarterback simply refuses to lose close games the way he has his whole career, Kansas City is back at ten wins and this preview looks foolish. He has done it before, and the fade is a lean rather than a plunge for exactly that reason. Monday night in Denver is the first test, and it is a hard one.
After Denver, the schedule offers a chance to argue with the projection. Indianapolis comes to Kansas City in Week 2, then the Chiefs go to Miami and Las Vegas in consecutive weeks before a Week 5 bye. When we ran that stretch, Kansas City was favored in Miami and Las Vegas and a slight underdog to the Colts at home, and a 3-1 record entering the bye is entirely on the table for a team our model has at seven and a half wins. That is the shape of a Chiefs season by these numbers. The soft stretches get handled, the division games do not, and the record settles a game or two under .500 by December. If the Monday night game in Denver goes the other way, the model will move. If Kansas City handles the easy month and loses the hard ones, it will not.
So the read is a good team in a hard division, not the inevitable AFC champion, and the model is a touch more certain of that than it was in July. The dynasty is not over. The margin that made it untouchable has narrowed to nothing, and a losing record is now the median outcome in our numbers. The era of penciling Kansas City in for a bye is over, and the model said it before a single Chiefs snap was played.
