Rams at Chiefs - Week 12 - Record: 9-2

At the end of last season I'd said we only have three defensive players who are keepers. Chris Jones, Nick Bolton, and Willie Gay. This year it is pretty much the same but I would add Trent McDuffie and L'Jarius Sneed to the keeper list. Maybe that's okay, that we have five guys who are "tagged" as so good they're among the best big-D guys.

Or is it bad that there are so few?

I mean, they showed a stat on the television that told us the Chiefs are 31st in the NFL in opponent quarterback rating as well as number of opponent touchdown passes.

That stinks.

McDuffie is a terrific find, very true. And there may be some promise with our very young defensive backfield -- I mean really, at any given time defensively we may have McDuffie as well as rookies Jaylen Watson, Joshua Williams, and Bryan Cook on the field at the same time. Danged... four rookies in an NFL crunch-time situation backfield. I think back to 1981 when the 49ers had three rookies in the backfield -- Ronnie Lott, Carlton Williamson, and Eric Wright -- and they did great, the team even went on to win the Super Bowl that year.

But still. Today we were facing the Rams third-string QB and an overall depleted offense.

This defense. Errrghnnckghcknnnnn...

Jones was a disrupter yet again. Bolton was getting his hits in. McDuffie was a smothering force on the back end. Sneed had a clutch pick late in the game.

But what about the bendiness of the overall? Yeah it's nice to have a Patrick Mahomes to match score with score, but then, against a pretty good Rams defense today, Mahomes was not at his best in the red zone today -- even once getting picked in the end zone.

We did get through today's game with a good win, not overwhelming, but expected -- jacking our record to a very nice 9-2.

Here's the thing. New thread here. Follow me on this...

We play at Cincinnati's place next week. As I noted in my last blog post, their stadium is one of the ugly six as far as that destructive turf goes. What do you think about this idea?

Here you go: We rest our best players.

Seriously. Some selected nine or ten of our top players just don't see the field, at all. Sure it is very likely we'll lose to a very good Bengals team, but that's exactly it. 

What happens when we throw our very best players and most laborious effort on that field, we lose the game with, really, not as much to gain with the record we've already compiled, and we lose a number of key players to injury?

A week ago the World Champion Golden State Warriors NBA basketball team had a road back-to-back. An NBA schedule is rather grueling -- a game every other day, flying all over the country -- when you have a road back-to-back it is very hard on the body. So what did coach Steve Kerr do?

He rested his best players on that back end of that series.

Against a fine New Orleans Pelican team he rested Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Andrew Wiggins. That's the core of the team, all their very best players. Every one of them, sitting it out.

Exclusively playing the second-string, the Warriors lost by 40 points.

It was a gimme loss. New Orleans fans did not get to see the Warriors' best, much less enjoy the amazing handles of the best player in the game, Steph Curry. The game itself was predictably lousy.

But the Warriors are smart. They're World Champions for a reason.

They know come playoff time in April and May those guys absolutely have to have their legs underneath them.

Is the NBA unhappy about that? Most likely. But ya know? I only care about the Warriors (I've shared before they are my favorite basketball team.)

So yeah, I say rest those Chiefs guys. Pick any nine or ten. Patrick Mahomes leads the list. Let Chad Henne get some good in-game work. Get Ronald Jones a decent number of reps. Give JuJu a little more recovery time. Absolutely positively transcendently seriously. Make it an extra bye week for some of our guys -- hey there is a lot of talk about adding that extra bye week as a regular season feature anyway. 

I mean please, I can only think of that nasty facemask against our fine quarterback today. It looked really ugly, you know about it, a little after the 4th quarter started and the Chiefs were close to the Rams goal line. In fact Patrick Mahomes himself wouldn't like not playing, but ya know? Who's the boss? And what are we about as a team, overall, with the overall goal in mind?

And please, I wouldn't even really be as serious about this if it wasn't about us having to play on the ugly turf there in Cincinnati.

The only real drawback is the way the Bengals, and again the NFL itself, will think of this as some kind of slight against the Bengals. "What, you're not willing to play your very best against us? What's wrong with you?"

Nope. It's just we don't want our players injured on your ding-dong fake grass, and ya know what else? We don't think you should be playing on that yourselves -- for your players' sake -- so who're the greater fools?

So yeah Bengals and NFL, how about removing that turf, like, yesterday? A lot of players have been talking about it, not just me here in a cheezy little blog. They've been seeking formal action against it, for all the players' sake.

It'd be nice if the Chiefs made a bold move and rested their best next week.

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The pic of MVS is by Steve Sanders at the official Chiefs site. Thank you.

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