Chargers at Chiefs - Week 17 - Record: 14-2

One of the good things about being so dominant during the regular season that you clinch the bye a week early is that you can rest your best players and get them healthy for the postseason run. One of the bad things is that in a meaningless regular season game you can lose to injury some of the players you may really need later.

Today we lost Willie Gay early and the extent of that injury is still unknown. We also lost this fine defensive back, DeAndre Baker who was shining before he yanked his leg all out of whack. It is not good to lose Gay because we will really need his speed and length out there at linebacker, but it may be just as not-good to lose Baker because he did provide really nice depth in the D-backfield. It appears certain Baker will be out for some time, his injury looked really bad. 

Another bad thing about this game is we just let the Chargers run all over us. It wasn't just because we had mostly second stringers in. Give them credit, their QB Justin Herbert is very good -- I believe the Chargers will be a prime foe in future Chiefs divisional action. By getting spanked like we did today, it ends a long string of games we've kept any loss to at least one score. This is our first loss by more than a one-possession score since we lost to Dallas in 2017, 28-17. At least Mahomes didn't start, so his "one score" streak is still intact.

Meanwhile on the plus side Darwin Thompson looked terrific today, I wonder if his performance will mean carries in the post-season. He ran the ball with authority, he caught the ball well, he matriculated his body in and around their defense nicely. There were other things that were nice about some of our players getting a chance to do some things on the field today -- on one catch Byron Pringle had a marvelous twisty-turny run to set up our third touchdown. Tim Ward had some nice sacks on the defensive side.

On to a hopefully very deep postseason run! If I've got it in me I'll certainly put up a little pre-postseason post here sometime before two weeks from now.

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